Burn, baby, burn…

Updated on February 22, 2007 By Ken Begg 8 Comments

The February 12th issue of Weekly Variety has an interesting article on Wal*Mart’s plans to install DVD burning kiosks in their stores.  There are still technical issues to be hashed out, but in sum, you’d go to the machine and order a title, then come back in 10 or 15 minutes and pick up a freshly burned DVD.  (Or you could order in online in advance and pick it up at the store.) 

Since these would come via Internet download, pretty much any commercially available title would be offered.  Whereas the typical Wal*Mart might ordinarily carry, at best, a couple of thousand standard DVD titles, the kiosks would have over 60,000 titles available.

This should really help small, weird companies, whose wares would be much more instantly available, and not be hampered by limited shelf space.  Sadly, there was no discussion of what the price points might be, but hopefully this system would offer cheaper (if perhaps at first bare boned) products, given the lacking of shipping expenses and whatnot.  It would certainly allow independent companies to perhaps offer their wares cheaper, and gain market share that way.

Or maybe not.  Still, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

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  • Danny

    This is the greatest idea Walmart has ever had, and I firmly stand behind it.

    Well, depending on the price points, of course, but I’d imagine downloaded and burned DVDs would actually be cheaper than normal DVDs. iTunes charges around $14.99 for a recent movie, and $9.99 for older ones. I doubt these will cost much more, given the low price of blank DVDs and the frightening determination of Walmart to keep prices down.

    I doubt it’ll be long before we get TV shows and music CDs this way, too. That’d do wonderful things for small groups, allowing them a better chance to maybe win an audience and take off.

    Hooray for the future!

  • ericb

    Yeah, I’m suprised music stores haven’t started doing this.

  • Chris Magyar

    *sniff sniff* I smell crippling DRM all over this. I’ll be amazed if they work in 60% of the DVD players out there, or at all on computers (which people increasingly use to watch movies).

  • Ken HPoJ

    Actually (assuming I’m getting, through context, what you mean by DRM), the article mentioned that Wal*Mart is demanding that any encryption software wouldn’t reduce the ability of any DVD player to play these discs.

    People beat on Wal*Mart for having “too much power,” but when they throw their weight around, it’s usually to keep the comsumer pleased. That’s probably why Wal*Mart is so uniquely successful.

  • Chris Magyar

    I’m not a Wal-Mart basher by reflex, but judging by their music download service (which uses Microsoft Play-For-Sh*t DRM that cripples it for use on iPods AND Microsoft Zunes — not to mention won’t serve people who use Macs at all), I’m not going to assume the best when it comes to DVDs, especially since the movie industry has been so much more successfully hyperventilatory about piracy than even the lawsuit-happy RIAA. I stand by my estimation of these DVDs’ playability.

  • Philidor

    How would WalMart’s DVD kiosks help small, weird companies?

    If no one has heard of a movie, no one will order the movie.

    There’s a related assertion that internet availability will replace promotion by large music companies. But the public has to know the product is there and have a reason to try it.

    Mr. Begg has probably done more for (deservedly) obscure movies than WalMart could. Except that, from the description, the guide is more entertaining than the attraction.

  • Danny

    Well, I imagine there’ll be a search function. There’ll be people who get movies at random when they’re bored (B-movie fans, especially), and spread good films through word of mouth.

    Which wouldn’t be that helpful, were it not for the internet.

    Someone can suddenly become semi-famous if the right person mentions him. The entire “nerdcore” subgenre of rap took off solely because the Penny Arcade guys linked to MC Frontalot. We live in a world where “Word of mouth” can advertise something to hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Plus, it daisy chains. If Ken mentions a small-company movie here, I’ll see it, and perhaps mention it on the ocremix.org forums, meaning a thousand people would’ve been exposed to the movie, and a handful of them might buy and and tell their friends, etc.

    Plus, of course, Youtube.

    Bigger companies will have more advertising revenue, and they’ll benefit from that. But a clever enough marketing guru has a chance (albeit an unlikely one), of outdoing them without spending a cent, if he can make an ad good enough to be a meme.

    Don’t believe me? Ask people around you (especially internet-savvy people), to fill in the following blanks:

    Blood and _____________
    All you ____ are belong to us.

    I bet more people know the second than the first, and All Your Base was a flash movie costing millions of dollars less than the Ads for Blood and Chocolate.

    Alteritavely, look at “Snakes on a Plane”. Pretty much everyone wanted to see the movie before they started really advertising it.

    We’re entering this weird new world of merit-based advertisement.

    Hey, Red vs. Blue (http://rvb.roosterteeth.com/home.php) is an independent film (well, was. Now they have Microsoft’s blessing and co-operation), and they’ve succeeded quite well on word of mouth. Five seasons (each one about a movie length total), with an initial investment of probably $1000 dollars for an Xbox, controllers, computer, and microphones (which they probably had anyway). If a bunch of kids can become professional full-time (albeit not big-time) filmmakers just on word of mouth….

    The webcomics Ctrl-Alt-Delete and PVP both have animated series available for purchase, both doing fairly well.

    Whoo. Tangent. But yeah. Big companies can make big money through big avertising campaigns, but the world of entertainment is slowly shifting from people trying to make a killing to people trying to make a living. It’s actually quite the revolution. Power to the people, free love, etc., but I watch three TV shows a week (Daily Show, Heroes, 24), and read 28 webcomics of varying solvency*, as well as watch an online TV show.

    (*Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, PVP, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, 8-Bit theater, Bob and George, VG Cats, Gunnerkrigg Court, Applegeeks, Slightly Damned, Kanami, Momoka Corner, Tomoyo42’s Room, Girl Genius, Count Your Sheep, Chugworth Academy, Least I Could Do, Misfile Kevin and Kell, Girly, Shortpacked, Dr McNinja, Questionable Content, Templar Arizona, Narbonic Director’s Cut, Erfworld, and the best of the bunch, Order of the Stick. Nearly all of these update several times a week. That’s a lot of my leisure time not spend on mainstream entertainment.)

  • Altair IV

    The big benefit for small companies is that the stores will be able to “stock” the products without actually needing to reserve shelf space for them. All sorts of old, rare, niche market and otherwise not-generally-popular stuff that in the past would’ve been pushed off the shelves in order to make room for the newest blockbuster hit will now always be available at the touch of a button or two. No more need for fans to hunt through specialty shops and flea markets; whole catalogs can be stored very cheaply online and shipped and burned as needed.

    Note that this is separate from the advertising aspect. The actual promotion of the titles will still need to be done elsewhere. But sales will no longer be lost simply because the people who do want to buy the products are unable to find them.

    BTW, Mr. Begg said that the titles will probably be “bare-boned” at first. I assume he’s referring to the “bonus features” you usually find on the more expensive DVDs. But there’s no real need for that to be true. If, as I suspect, they simply store the titles as complete disk images, there’s be no need to believe that the contents will be any different from the prepackaged versions. Quite the reverse actually, since it would undoubtedly cost more to produce special “download” versions than to simply duplicate existing disks. I suspect the only thing you might find lacking would be the packaging, which generally isn’t all that fancy to begin with anyway, in my experience.