Well, Wal-Mart has jumped into the online movie business, and grabbed more partners than Apple right out of the gate:

Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has met the studios' demands and will be pricing movies from $7.50 to $19.98. The company will have new downloads on the same day as their DVD release, and they will also host $1.96 TV shows from Fox, CW, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo and VH1 (ABC, NBC, CBS nowhere to be found). Classic movies will sell for $7.50 to $9.98, while most other titles will float somewhere between $9.99 and the new release price of $19.98.

I think the $19.98 price is kind of absurd - if the physical DVD is the same price, I'm not sure why I want to wait hours for it to download - especially given this:

Wal-Mart is letting the studios mimic brick and mortar prices for physical DVDs, which is exactly how this deal got done. Does this price increase mean you can burn DVDs and watch them? No. The feature set is still depressingly weak: no burnable DVDs, no easy sharing among your devices, no high-definition. The only differentiator here, aside from the larger catalog, is the price itself. Well, there's one other small matter: by using Microsoft's DRM, the studios can puts tabs on sharing.

That's just not interesting. Sure, Wal-Mart isn't targeting the high end, but at this point in time, the download audience is the high end - and that audience isn't going to be entirely pleased with those restrictions. Color me unimpressed.

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