Walmart is starting a service to let customers create digital versions of DVD movies they own for a small fee, the company announced Tuesday. A new collaboration with Vudu will allow people to bring their discs into Walmart, pay $2 or more to get a Vudu-facilitated digital copy of the movie stored in their account with Vudu.
The uploads use the UltraViolet DRM system created by a collective of entertainment studio partners (the service is facilitated by Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros). The conversion service works as follows: customers take their old discs to a Walmart Photo Center and pay $2 to have each DVD or Blu-ray converted to a digital version, or $5 to upgrade a standard-definition disc to an HD digital version. After the DVD is converted, customers keep the disc. For now, the service only works for DVDs from the studios listed above, and only for movies in Vudu's catalog—TV shows are excluded.
The digital versions are automatically placed in a Vudu account. This will be created for you at the Photo Center, if you don't already have one. Then, the movies will be accessible for streaming on "more than 300 Internet-connected devices," according to Walmart (which bought Vudu in 2010 for $100 million). Those 300 devices include game consoles like the XBox 360 and Playstation 3, and set top boxes like Boxee.
Of course, DVD owners have long had ways of turning their DVDs into digital files without visiting a store or paying a dime, irritating to the studios though it may be. The question is whether the need to visit a store and pay fees will be a sufficiently low-resistance process. In response to a question about whether it would be necessary for customers to visit a store or pay a fee to convert movies they already own, a Walmart representative told Ars that "we need to be able to verify they are actual DVDs."
reader comments
99