Wal-Mart online film service has more method than madness

The Register has a bit of an editorial on Wal-Mart's foray into the digital download world. They seem to think this is the retail giant's attempt and dipping their big toe into this new arena.

From the article:

But there’s more to this than meets the eye. In the process of getting portable copies of the first video, Superman Returns, Wal-Mart has got customers to download its download manager. That’s a neat trick, just as iTunes got customers to download iTunes because they wanted to use the store, now consumers have less interest in downloading other people’s software just to see a store. So Wal-Mart has to get customers to do it for a different reason. In this case it’s in order to create a small audience of beta testers for the Wal-Mart software, and in each case they have to create an account with Wal-Mart.