atmaspheric | endeavors

Today the company will introduce a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios — Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal — to sell digital movies and television shows on its Web site (www.walmart.com/videodownloads), becoming the first traditional retailer to do so. [New York Times]

While I am not surprised to see that Walmart is embracing Windows DRM (other than Apple’s FairPlay, it’s the only game in town), but check out this lovely view of their website on a Mac:

To me, this is a total F-U. It’s a complete lock-out. Walmart is saying, there’s only one platform that we recognize and that’s Windows through IE. I was able to get the page to load with Safari, but Firefox and Camino but displayed the loveliness above.

The only thing I can give credit to Walmart for is that they have a single price for each film (prices actually vary by title) which will let you get both a download and a portable version for the same price - which is the default.
BTW — I just noticed that Apple has an ad on the NYT page promoting iPod and iTunes which not only competes with this service, but is completely incompatible.

Technorati Tags: Apple, digital distribution, DRM, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Movie Downloads, Safari, Walmart