Walmart, the USA's largest home entertainment retailer, has partnered with five Hollywood studios to offer a disc-to-digital service to its customers via VUDU, the video streaming operation the giant retailer owns.

Starting 16 April, Walmart customers will be able to bring their DVD and Blu-ray discs to more than 3,500 stores and receive digital access to their titles from the partnering studios - Paramount, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Consumers can thus access their content over Internet-connected devices, including television sets, tablets, smartphones and gaming consoles.

"Walmart Entertainment's new disc-to-digital service will allow our customers to reconnect with the movies they already own on a variety of new devices, while preserving the investments they've made in disc purchases over the years," says John Aden, executive vice president for general merchandising, Walmart US. "We believe this revolutionary in-store service will unlock new value for already-owned DVDs, and will encourage consumers to continue building physical and digital movie libraries in the future."

The process to convert previously-purchased DVD/Blu-ray movies to digital copies is as follow:

- Consumers bring their movie collections from the participating studio partners to a local Walmart Photo Center, where they get help to create a free VUDU account.

- They chose the format in which they want the content on their disc converted. A DVD and Blu-ray disc can be converted into a digital file in their respective definition format for $2. Standard DVDs can be upgraded to high-definition for $5.

- Walmart will authorize the digital copies and place them in the customers' VUDU account. No upload is necessary, and the customers keep their physical discs.

- By logging onto VUDU.com from more than 300 Internet-connected devices the customers can watch their movies any time, any place.

Walmart says it supports UltraViolet, the movie industry's initiative currently in its beta phase that allows consumers to put their purchased movies into a cloud-based digital library. The retailer offers customers the ability to watch and purchase UltraViolet-enabled titles directly from VUDU.

Story filed 14.03.12