As more than one person has already pointed out, the demise of Wal-Mart’s video download service comes as no real surprise. In many ways, it was stillborn to begin with. Why? Simple. Even when it was launched, it was obvious (to everyone but Wal-Mart, apparently) that the service was too restrictive. Only Windows format, and only on one computer, with no burning? It would have been a miracle if it had survived.

As Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music said in his recent call to arms for online music, “inconvenience doesn’t scale.” Wal-Mart is the size of a Latin American country in terms of revenues ($370-billion) and population (it has 2 million employees), not to mention market capitalization ($200-billion), but it still can’t make something as crippled as its movie service was popular by brute force.

Wal-Mart’s massive size might have helped it get deals with the studios for their content, but it apparently didn’t help the retailer pressure said studios into giving up the handcuffs they like to place on that content — either Wal-Mart wasn’t able to convince them, or it didn’t try hard enough. Let’s hope the failure of its service doesn’t convince others that it wasn’t worth it to even try; Wal-Mart’s effort was doomed from the start.

In what shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been watching the video download race heat up, retailing behemoth Wal-Mart is announcing a download service today that will feature both movies and TV shows from all six major studios: Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal. Movies will be $10 to $20 and TV shows will be $2.

Obviously, having all six studios taking part will help Wal-Mart by broadening the amount of content it can offer (theoretically at least). One of the biggest issues with other ventures such as the virtual ghost towns known as CinemaNow and MovieLink — which were put together by the studios themselves — is a lack of compelling content, much like the Video On Demand channels that cable providers like Rogers have in Canada, where you get the dregs from the theatres.

As Mike Arrington at TechCrunch points out, there are plenty of players in this particular game, including the aforementioned MovieLink and CinemaNow, as well as Amazon’s Unbox.com (A note to Canadians: none of these are available to Canucks, just as we are banned from watching the TV shows that NBC and other networks are streaming from their websites, and just as we can’t get movies and TV shows on iTunes for that matter — don’t get me started).

Rafat Ali at PaidContent and others have noted that Wal-Mart’s foray into movie rentals a la Netflix was kiboshed after a brief run, and an analyst says in the the New York Times story that the results of this latest venture will likely never be more than “a freckle” on the giant company’s earnings. He’s undoubtedly right about that — Wal-Mart’s revenue last year was $340-billion, and it made a profit of almost $12-billion.

In case you’re wondering, that makes Wal-Mart about 10 times the size of Walt Disney Co. in terms of sales, and about four times as large in terms of profit. In fact, it’s probably larger than all of the six movie studios put together. Which makes me wonder: why doesn’t Wal-Mart offer movies for free? Time-limit the downloads so you only get them for a day, and use them as a loss leader. Of course, the studios would never go for that kind of deal.