Just twelve days into the future (Oct 9), people silly enough to think that a megalith retailer like Wal-Mart couldn’t sustain a DRM server for folks who opted to purchase music through its website laden with copyright protection software (that it was quite willing to adopt to appease RIAA members’ fears before it pledged seasons ago to do without such burdensome locks) will have to regard those transactions from years past as money not well spent.

All is not lost, however. So long as you have in your possession recordable audio disc with which to “back up” your DRM-infused media, you can retain the freedom to do as you please with your files. Naturally, burning digital copies for safekeeping will degrade the audio quality of your songs somewhat, but that’s not much of an issue. You were likely satisfied enough to purchase subpar recordings from Wal-Mart’s online storefront to begin with, so what’s a little less bitrate for your buck anyway?

Now, Wal-Mart doesn’t insist that you purchase recordable discs from its own shelves, of course. To do so would be tantamount to a near complete abrogation of corporate propriety. But there’s a good chance you did spend (or will do so in the coming weeks) that other bit of cash for that physical media with the same species consumis gigantis. So…you know…there it is.

Boing Boing co-editor and staunch anti-DRM machine Cory Doctorow too exhibited no reservation in poking fun about the news as it broke late this week. He wrote, “Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal-Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they’re repaying your honesty by taking away your music. … Boy, the entertainment industry sure makes a good case for ripping them off, huh? Buy your media and risk having it confiscated by a DRM-server shutdown. Take it for free and keep it forever.”

In short, the initial payment was anywhere between $0.88 and $0.99 per track, from which buyers are given the option to pay more (for the discs) to obtain less (lower quality hard copies). Do correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is precisely why people don’t smile and think happy when the subject of DRM and all the nastiness it entails enters and re-enters and re-re-enters the public conversation. Also, it drives us to revisit the fact that the largest seller of DRM-laden music active on the Web today (Apple), is still forced by manipulative record studios to continue to hawk millions of protected songs each and every day to the consumer class to the (presumed) eventual revolt of people who pay their salaries. Now that’s a recipe for success if there ever was one.

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Wal-Mart Stores may have lost the online DVD rental battle, but it has no plans to lose the higher-stakes video downloading war.

Today the company will introduce a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios — Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal — to sell digital movies and television shows on its Web site (www.walmart.com/videodownloads), becoming the first traditional retailer to do so. The move plunges Wal-Mart into competition with several established sites, like Amazon.com, CinemaNow and iTunes, and given the chain’s penchant for price cutting, could drive down the cost of a digital download. But supremacy in the digital movie business could prove elusive for Wal-Mart, a company that is used to being the No. 1 seller of everything from DVDs to diamonds.

Apple already dominates the online music and movie industry, leaving a sliver for everyone else to fight over. And Wal-Mart has already stumbled once before with online video rentals, shutting down its DVD rental business two years ago and referring users to its rival Netflix instead. “As much of an 800-pound gorilla as they are in retail sales, they are an 80-pound weakling when it comes to digital distribution,” said Michael Goodman, digital entertainment program manager at the Yankee Group, a consulting firm.

This time, however, Wal-Mart says it has used its clout to pull together all the right Hollywood players, create an easy-to-use Web site with Hewlett-Packard and develop a broad library of videos. One big draw, it says, is that all the top studios have signed on. Even in a business crowded with new companies, “we will be the only one at this point in time to have the support of all six of the majors,” said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart’s divisional merchandise manager for digital media.

On the television side, Wal-Mart will cull titles from networks big and small, like Comedy Central, CW, FX, Logo, MTV and Nickelodeon. It will have access to 3,000 productions, including films like “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Little Miss Sunshine” and TV series like “24” and “Veronica Mars.” Download prices will be $12.88 to $19.88 on the day of the DVD release; older movies will start at $7.50 and TV shows at $1.96 an episode.

Wal-Mart said its prices would be competitive, and a quick scan of a major rival, CinemaNow, suggested the prices would be relatively close. A download of “Superman Returns” cost $14.88 on WalMart.com yesterday versus $14.95 on Cinema Now. To avoid running afoul of studios, who want to protect their DVD business, Wal-Mart said the price of a digital movie would be comparable to that of the DVD at its stores. To be considered a success, Wal-Mart’s download service will not only have to compete with strong rivals. It will have to pass the same test all services do at WalMart.com: to lure customers into Wal-Mart’s 4,000 stores, to buy groceries, electronics and clothing. Wal-Mart’s online video-rental service failed to do just that, and analysts said the digital download system could encounter the same problem. “If you are doing digital distribution, you are doing it because you do not want to be in the store,” said Mr. Goodman of the Yankee Group.

Mr. Swint of Wal-Mart said the company would create discounts that encouraged shoppers to purchase both DVDs and digital videos. “There will be customers who download and be done with it,” he said, “but we will have offers that begin online and end in the store.” Bill Dreher, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities, said that by becoming a Web destination for videos, Wal-Mart would bolster its position as an authority for all things digital, perhaps enticing customers to buy a PC or television at either WalMart.com or a store. Even so, Mr. Dreher said he did not expect sales from the digital video service to “become more than a freckle” on the chain’s earnings.

FOR most small businesses, competing on the Web is hardly easier than competing offline, where gigantic retailers with huge marketing budgets dominate. But for Amenity Home, a start-up in Los Angeles with three products, four employees and no marketing budget, getting noticed was a simple matter of word-of-mouth advertising, albeit in an unusual way.

Late last month, an online shopper posted a photo of one of Amenity Home’s $400 duvet covers on ThisNext.com, one of a new breed of Web sites that promises to connect independent-minded shoppers with hard-to-find products. Other shoppers copied the photo to their own blog pages, bringing the company some much-welcome attention, said Kristina de Corpo, an Amenity Home founder.

“We’re a young business furiously trying to keep our heads above water, so this is really exciting,” she said. “We’ve gotten tons of hits from it.”

Sites like ThisNext and a handful of services like Kaboodle.com, Wists.com and StyleHive.com are spearheading a new category of e-commerce called “social shopping,” that tries to combine two favorite online activities: shopping and social networking. These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some shopping-related technology twists included.

Social shopping is just the latest solution to a chronic problem for online retailers and shoppers: many shoppers aren’t sure what to buy, but they know they won’t find it on the sites of mainstream retailers like Macy’s, Amazon or Wal-Mart.

Online retailers often refer to this as the “product discovery” problem, but it might better be referred to as online retailing’s Teflon piñata, so many times have entrepreneurs tried to crack it.

“Online shopping is more accurately described as purchasing, because it’s so directed and goal-specific,” said Gordon Gould, ThisNext’s chief executive. “You might be looking for a plasma screen TV, but there’s not a lot of lateral thinking about what else you might be interested in. We want to show people other products that wouldn’t make sense for an e-tailer to batch together.”

•Users who register with social shopping services typically create their own pages to collect information on items they find. But instead of simply describing what they have found on other sites and posting a Web address, they can download a piece of software that allows them to grab images of those products to post on their own shopping lists.

The social shopping services can then post pictures of items that have been viewed or circulated widely among visitors who have searched the site for, say, home furnishing ideas.

The social shopping sites hope to parlay that enthusiasm into advertising revenue, once they attract enough visitors to go back to merchants with a better sales pitch. Some sites, like ThisNext, also plan to form so-called affiliate relationships with merchants, who often pay percent commissions on sales that come as a result of their products being featured on other sites.

ThisNext also gives users the ability to transfer pictures or videos of their favorite products from the site to their personal blog pages. Mr. Gould said the site could also eventually make money by helping companies find influential customers that they might involve in early-stage marketing plans or product testing, among other things.

“If you’re the go-to guy for buying Kona coffee, I want to find you, not a generalist,” he said.

Kaboodle, meanwhile, has created another revenue source by striking a deal late last month with eBay’s comparison shopping service, Shopping.com. Under that agreement, whenever a Kaboodle user features a product that also appears on the Shopping.com database, Kaboodle will post the prices at which the product is sold online at various merchants. Should a reader click through to the merchant’s site, Kaboodle will earn a share of the fee the merchant pays Shopping.com for that click.

Kaboodle has also worked with eBay to create pages for collectors of certain items on Kaboodle, wherein they can receive feeds of eBay auctions that are relevant to their collections.

The site, which has about 50,000 registered users, has so far raised $3.55 million from well-known Silicon Valley investors, like Guy Kawasaki and Shea Ventures, according to Manish Chandra, Kaboodle’s chief executive.

Last week Kaboodle introduced a set of new features, including one that allows users to run a slideshow of the products on their list, and then transport that slideshow to their own blog pages. (That could account for the late-summer popularity of a collection of string bikinis featured on Kaboodle’s home page last week.)

According to Rob Goldman, who leads the American division of Shopping.com, Kaboodle and its cohort have potential.

“Who knows? This may be the only way you shop for clothes in the future, by seeing what your friends and other people are wearing,” he said. “But in the scheme of the way commerce is conducted online right now, I’d see these more as venture investments, and less as line extensions.”

Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with Jupiter Research, an online consultant, agreed. The increasing popularity of customer reviews on retailer sites and elsewhere, she said, “will help get customers a little more engaged, and thinking about recommendations from other people, which is what ThisNext and these other sites are based on.”

One hurdle, Ms. Evans said, is getting users to go through the trouble of downloading software so they can grab images of products they like, assuming they are motivated enough to post favorite products to begin with.

Ms. Evans said that social shopping sites would also have to be vigilant against featuring stale products — a particularly vexing issue for fashion merchandise — because retailers typically carry such products for about 12 weeks.

But instant popularity for such sites is not assured. “I think this will have a nice developing trajectory, rather than something that’ll explode tomorrow,” Ms. Evans said. “Customers are so used to going to the store to discover new products that it’ll take a long time to get them out of that.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company