Variety reports that Walmart has moved another step closer to its rumored plans for a low-price streaming service for “middle America”—you know, because nobody in Indiana has a Netflix account. The retail mega-giant has just hired Mark Greenberg, former CEO of Epix (it’s a cable network) in order to help tease out the feasibility of its plans, ensuring that the same mind that brought us Graves will now be on this most important of jobs.
Walmart hasn’t made any formal announcement about its plans yet, but The Wall Street Journal is now reporting on Greenberg’s partnership with the corporate monolith, which already owns the Vudu video on demand platform. Epix (it’s a cable network) laid some similar groundwork to what Walmart is presumably trying to do, launching not just on TV, but also with a number of digital options for consumers to watch its library of films (and handful of shows).
If we’re being honest, we have no idea what Walmart would actually find to stream on this thing—and it’s not clear if the company knows, either; again, it’s not like Netflix and Amazon aren’t perfectly happy to cater to every content-heavy demographic on the planet, regardless of political or cultural leanings. In any case, the go/no go decision will come some time in late summer; in the meantime, watch out for falling expectations.
