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Quite randomly, I received a notification from Wal-Mart that they had decided to terminate their music service. I was given a month to download the files from their server to my hard drive. And this was the number one retailer in the world bailing out of the digital music service. If Wal-Mart is not foolproof, who is? This is a particularly important point as we discuss Vudu next week since it is now owned and operated by Wal-Mart.

What you should take from the above is that the also-rans in the movie cloud industry may not be in this for the long haul. As such, hedging your bets with multiple services is a solid choice as is meticulously researching market conditions and selecting only the cloud service(s) you are confident will survive. I do not want anyone to invest a great deal of money into cloud movie storage then find themselves abandoned by a particular service. Remarkably, this has already happened to one unlucky group of early adopters.

Given that there are very real concerns about which services will last, I will now evaluate them based upon my personal experiences with each one. We have tried all of the major players as well as most of the minor ones. Netflix is obviously the service you are most likely to use for cloud-based rentals. We will not focus on this aspect of streaming. Instead, the topic at hand is permanent cloud ownership.

There are four major players right now: Amazon, Vudu, Cinemanow and Apple. Blockbuster was ostensibly the fifth, but the new ownership group at Dish Network decided to remove themselves from the marketplace. In fact, Blockbuster is completely gone from TiVo now as well as several other services. My HDTV app recently notified me of this: “Thank you for using Blockbuster. The Blockbuster service is no longer available. If you have purchased content for ownership through Blockbuster, we will send an email for further information.” Yikes!

This is a textbook example of the danger I mentioned above. Anyone who threw in their cloud support with Blockbuster is totally screwed. At this point, I not only do not recommend Blockbuster as a consideration but consider it an abject lesson in the dangers of picking the wrong cloud movie service. This week’s conversation will focus upon the current contenders in the marketplace that I dislike, Apple and Cinemanow. Next week, I will discuss the choices I recommend, Amazon, Vudu and Ultraviolet.

Excluding Blockbuster, the worst solution right now is Cinemanow. Frankly, this service aptly represents what a gigantic mess Best Buy is as a corporation. None of the decisions regarding the service make any sense to me. This was crystallized at the end of last year when Best Buy generously offered free codes for movie downloads over the holidays. I recognize it is poor taste to judge a service at least partially for its free products. Even so, Cinemanow has serious flaws.

A seminal aspect of building your cloud movie library is forward thinking. A poor decision would be to invest in standard definition copies of titles. I feel strongly about this, because HDTVs continue to drop in price to the point where they are fungible purchases. This is in stark opposition to 20 years ago when the home’s primary television was a living room staple for many years. From the time I was born until I was 25, my father bought exactly one television for his living room. I’ve purchased three in the past year (although that was a forced decision in the wake of the fire). As such, I am adamant that your video library needs to be in HD. You have spent a lot of money on a high quality, state of the art television set. There is no point in purchasing outdated standard definition titles to play on your HDTV when even your cellphone (!) is capable of high resolution video.

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