Walmart Hungers for World Domination With E-Books, Movie Rentals

From DailyTech: Walmart may be the largest retail chain in the U.S. and one of the biggest companies in the world, but the wildly successful ultra-ubiquitous retailer has shown signs of weakness in sales of physical media like DVDs and CDs. Competitors like Amazon.com and Apple have stolen away plenty of business with their digital downloads.

Walmart offers downloads of its own. In 2009 it held less than 8 percent of the digital market, though. On the other hand, it was the second largest total retailer of music (physical and digital) at 14 percent, behind only Apple (25 percent).

Now Walmart has acquired a startup called Vudu that offers movies and TV shows for sale or rental over the internet. The service is currently compatible with numerous internet-connected devices including many Blu-ray disc players and some LG televisions.

The acquisition terms were not made public.

Walmart is also thought to be cooking up an e-book deal with knfb Reading Technology, a joint venture of the National Federation for the Blind and Kurzweil Technologies, run by futurist Ray Kurzweil. Knfb provides services which allow large retailers to set up e-book stores within weeks. Mr. Kurzweil would only comment, "We have agreements with large retail chains."

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