Even with Walmart's discounted digital music that undercut many of its competitors, the company struggled to make significant in-roads into the digital music market. The retail giant is not alone in this: other retailers including Amazon and specialists like HMV (UK) have also found online music challenging.  For the most part this can be attributed to these companies' lack of the sort of  hardware-plus-content ecosystem, that Apple developed with iPod + iTunes Store. The widespread removal of DRM and transition to the near-universal MP3 format has done little to shake Apple's dominance. More recently Amazon has resorted to a strategy of spectacular discounts, such as $0.99 for Lady Gaga's second album in its first week of sale, in order to build awareness and market share. Rather than get into this sort of loss making promotional discount the largest physical music retailer in the US has decided to eschew digital music retail altogether.

The contrast in strategy to Walmart's approach to online video through its Vudu subsidiary could not be more apparent. Where the music store never got on to the devices that consumers use to listen to music, the retailer has made devices a priority for its video services, negotiating Vudu's way onto the Playstation 3 in 2010 and recently announcing its availability on the iPad. In the latter case the company has followed the same model as the Financial Times and, latterly, Amazon's Cloud Reader by using a customized version of its website, rather than an app from the App Store, to reach consumers. This approach allows Vudu to give the same video quality experience as a local app (by using Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) adaptive bit rate solution) but avoids the sort of restrictions that govern apps from Apple's store.  With this availability on devices, then Vudu's aggressive pricing strategy, which offers rentals for as low as $1-2, can come into play. The result is that in H1 2011 Vudu became the number three transactional online video service in America.