Vudu, Walmart’s digital movie service, has a new boss: Jeremy Verba is now the unit’s general manager and VP, reporting to Walmart eCommerce boss Gibu Thomas.
Walmart’s iTunes Rival Gets a New Boss
Jeremy Verba, most recently spotted running eHarmony, takes control of Vudu.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Verba has a wide-ranging digital resume, with stops including AOL, CNET and E! Online. His most recent posting was a one-year stint running dating site eHarmony; prior to that he had been GM at Zynga.
Vudu is Walmart’s answer to iTunes, offering movie sales and rentals on an a la carte basis, as opposed to Netflix’s subscription model. At the beginning of 2013, research service NPD said Vudu had 15 percent of the digital “sell-through” market, trailing Amazon’s 18 percent and Apple’s 45 percent.
Since then, however, pay-TV providers, led by Comcast, have moved aggressively into the market, offering discounted movie titles and promoting them heavily. Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is a minority investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’s parent company.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
