Update: Wal-Mart Confirms Plans to Buy Vudu

22 February 2010

“Wal-Mart on Monday confirmed that it will purchased online movie service Vudu for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is expected to close in the next several weeks.”

So, is Wal-Vudu going to try to compete with Netflix? Hulu? iTunes? Okay… maybe not iTunes… But the obvious goal is media content delivery through internet-connected TVs and blue-ray players (Sony PS3).

Wal-Mart tried to compete with Netflix back in 2002. But were out of the market by 2005. Looks like they are back again.

The article states: “Vudu currently has a library of 16,000 movies and licensing deals with almost every major studio, as well as independent distributors.” Steve Jobs is going after the same thing I thought… but it’s still a little murky to me. And Vudu’s 16,000 titles pales in comparison to Netflix’s 100,000. Then again, all 100,00 titles are not internet viewable via streaming, so the actual comparison might be quite a bit closer.

All I know for certain is that internet TV is the future. Media, whether television, movies, newspapers, magazines, books, music, podcasts, etc. will all be consumed via the internet.

As technology continues to develop at stunning rates and the broadband backbone continues to expand we’ll expect to be able to digest our world in 1s and 0s.