Wal-Mart Sells Movies, TV Shows Online

Other online download and rental sites include Movielink, which is owned by five studios, and CinemaNow.

Unlike some offerings, Wal-Mart will not rent films online. The films can be played on a PC or transferred to Microsoft Windows Media-compatible portable digital players. The movies will not play on Apple computers or the popular iPod.

Movies bought from the Wal-Mart store also can't be burned onto a DVD, although the company said it hopes to offer the option by the end of the year.

Wal-Mart says it doesn't expect digital sales to cannibalize its retail DVD business for many years.

"Customers have a growing interest in downloading video content, but complementary and supplemental to buying content on DVD," Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's divisional manager for digital media, told The Associated Press.

"With the health of the DVD business and coming high-definition formats, that business will remain quite strong for quite a long time."

Internet downloading is expected to generate about $4 billion in annual revenue in five years, compared with an estimated $27 billion from DVD rentals and sales, according to Adams Media Research.

Whether Wal-Mart can translate its success on the ground to the digital domain remains to be seen.

Wal-Mart abandoned its efforts to build an online DVD rental service in 2005 to compete with the well-established Netflix Inc.

The retailer also faces the same challenge that confounds other online video sellers _ the fact that films cannot be easily transferred from a computer to a larger TV screen.

"The real problem is people want to watch these movies on their television set," said principal analyst Josh Bernoff of Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "There already is an effective way to do that, which is to buy a DVD."

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On the Net: http://www.walmart.com/videodownloads