Big news in the world of online DVD rentals… Wal-Mart has exited the business, and is throwing their weight behind NetFlix. In fact, if you hop over to the WalMart.com, you’ll see an ad for NetFlix plastered on their front page. Presumably their getting a kickback for customer referrals. It’ll be interesting to see what this does to the online rental market, as decreased competition generally doesn’t bode well for consumers. Then again, Wal-Mart was really only a niche player with around 300,000 customers. For the sake of comparison, NetFlix weighs in around 3,000,000 customers, whereas BlockBuster.com has managed to build a customer base of a little better than 800,000 in less than a year. Speaking from personal experience, NetFlix beats the heck out of BlockBuster in terms of both availability and turnaround time, and I can’t ever imagine switching back to BlockBuster.