Walmart to Unlock your DVD's with exclusive disc to digital service

[jinjuku]

From the 'Corporate Greed and Collusion Dept':

Walmart to Unlock America's Favorite Movies with Exclusive Disc-to-Digital Service

Retailer Partners with Hollywood to Increase Value of Movie Ownership with Any Time Access to DVDs

It’s time to unlock your DVDs America! The freedom to watch your movies any time, any place is here! Walmart is giving physical DVD/Blu-ray collections across the country a second life by turning them into digital movies. The nation’s largest home entertainment retailer is the first to announce an exclusive in-store disc-to-digital service which gives movie lovers the freedom to watch their DVD/Blu-ray collections from Internet-connected devices, including televisions, tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles and more. The service is powered by VUDU, the industry-leading video streaming service.

Lol. I love how Hollywood and and a 'We sell cheap plastic crap' retail chain is now in the business of doing the public a 'solid' by allowing them to now stream content they already own from a pay streaming service. That they are 'unlocking' your video library from physical media, but wait, only on Vudu approved appliances.

Roku? Nope, iPad/iPhone? Nope...

No thanks Walmart, or : Paramount Home Media Distribution, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, or Vudu.

Me and my Movie collection are just fine on:

My HTPC, My iPhone, My PSP, iPod Nano. I'm going to start calling Sony every time I watch one of their titles I purchased just to piss them off. BTW I buy all my titles used.

I buy titles used in the hope that the person I purchased from ripped it before they sold it to me. Actually I hope the DVD or BR disc say like 17 different owners who all ripped it before selling it on down the line before it finally ended up with me.

 

[sholling]

$2-4 per movie to "storage fee" allow you online access to what you've already paid for, at least until they decide to shut down the "service" or start charging additional fees.

 

[Hocky]

$2-4 per movie to "storage fee" allow you online access to what you've already paid for, at least until they decide to shut down the "service" or start charging additional fees.

$2 is a pretty stellar deal when you realistically consider the cost of storage and bandwidth to provide internet streaming of the movie. Of course, they're not really going to store your movie for you, they will all exist in the cloud and they'll just link to your account. But, that is what it is. I don't know that it will do well, but I can't be mad at them for trying to promote their own services.

 

[jinjuku]

$2 is a pretty stellar deal when you realistically consider the cost of storage and bandwidth to provide internet streaming of the movie. Of course, they're not really going to store your movie for you, they will all exist in the cloud and they'll just link to your account. But, that is what it is. I don't know that it will do well, but I can't be mad at them for trying to promote their own services.

You can however be a bit upset that they want to tell you that you can't rip your own DVD's to your own streamer.

That's the problem. They only want you doing something if they can make an additional dime off of it. If you try to do the same thing (which there are now $50 boxes you can add a 3TB HD to that will do it) they would love to take you to court.

 

[sholling]

$2 is a pretty stellar deal when you realistically consider the cost of storage and bandwidth to provide internet streaming of the movie. Of course, they're not really going to store your movie for you, they will all exist in the cloud and they'll just link to your account. But, that is what it is. I don't know that it will do well, but I can't be mad at them for trying to promote their own services.

Not really. They won't be storing 50,000 copies of a movie they'll store one and stream that. As for bandwidth that's cheap and how many times are you going to watch each of your videos? One article estimated the breakeven point at 50 plays per movie.

A better way to think of it is a version of Netflix where you have to buy the movies before you can stream them but can only stream them to a fraction of the devices Netflix supports. It's such a niche product that I expect that its own playback limitations will kill it off.