Walmart May Launch A Video Streaming Service, To Battle Netflix And Amazon

Walmart may be the next giant to enter the video streaming wars according to a report from The Information. Walmart is reportedly considering launching its own video streaming service to battle Netflix and Amazon Prime Video utilizing Microsoft Cloud Servers in a five year deal. Walmart wants to undercut its competition by pricing its service at $8 per month or lower. Additionally, Walmart is said to be considering an ad supported free tier of service as well.

Walmart isn't new to video streaming game it already owns Vudu, a service for buying and renting movies. Vudu launched its own ad supported streaming service Movies on Us a few years ago which has failed to take off to date.

According to the report the $8 per month price comes from the idea that Netflix and Amazon are more popular with customers on the East and West Coasts. Customers may move toward a lower cost option. Currently, Netflix prices its service between $8 and $14 per month while Amazon Prime Video is roughly $8 per month.


Source: The Information

Amazon Announces Fire TV

Amazon’s Fire TV has three times the power of any of the competitors listed above. It’s packs a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics processor for fast, fluid playback. It also has dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi to enable instant streaming with a feature called “ASAP” that pre-loads videos based on what you’ve watched previously. The more you use Fire TV, the more accurate ASAP gets.

Amazon Fire TV has a remote and a search aspect that Amazon is hyping. The entire interface is incredibly fluid and easy to navigate, and the remote contains a microphone that can be used for quick voice search. This is a huge improvement over most set-top boxes that require you to search by typing a query one letter at a time.

In addition to its ability to stream video, Fire TV can play games, stream music, create slideshows of your photos and even launch a kid mode dubbed FreeTime that includes tons of free content from Amazon Prime. Fire TV isn't a closed ecosystem with apps like Prime Instant Video, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Vimeo currently supported and more on the way.

Fire TV is available now from Amazon for $99. Fire TV is currently being offered with a 30-day free trial of both Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Source: Amazon