Details of Initial "Disc to Digital" Program Emerge

MojoKid writes with an excerpt from an article at Hot Hardware: "Walmart's burgeoning partnership with the Ultraviolet DRM system backed by major Hollywood studios and their plans to 'assist' customers in registering DVDs with the Ultraviolet system, made headlines not long ago. Walmart has also since announced additional details to the program and it's a clever attempt to drive more users to Vudu, Walmart's subsidiary movie streaming service. Here's how the service works. 'Starting April 16th, 2012 in more than 3,500 stores, Walmart customers will be able to bring their DVD and Blu-ray collections to Walmart and receive digital access to their favorite titles from the partnering studios. An equal conversion for standard DVDs and Blu-ray discs will be $2. Standard DVDs can be upgraded to High-Def (HD) for $5.' Anyone who doesn't have a Vudu account will have one created for them as part of this process. That's part of the genius to the plan. If customers embrace the offer, Walmart signs up hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people for Vudu. Even better, from Walmart's perspective, is that first-time users who pony up $2 for a digital version of their DVDs are effectively paying to create Vudu accounts."

Comments

Re:Possible High "Parental Factor"

[CastrTroy]

I'm not so sure... I got a couple big hard drives and started ripping my stuff and storing it on a NAS. It's pretty time consuming. I got about 30 or 40 movies done, but haven't done any in a while. There's a lot of messing around that I had to do to get it work right. I find that I have to use separate programs for ripping and conversion, because many discs have bad sectors (intentionally) to try to throw off less intelligent ripping programs. Not only that, but I found I got varying results. Some videos have audio out of sync even if I used the same settings that worked for all the other discs. A couple bucks a disk isn't that much when you consider how much work is involved. A technical person who also happens to make a lot of money (not uncommon) who doesn't want to waste a ton of free time converting DVDs could easily go for this. Although I'd think it would be much more palatable if you could also bring in a hard drive and get copies of the movies for your own use, and not restrict the viewing to online only.

I'd do it, with VHS tapes

[alispguru]

That would be an actual content upgrade, worth a token payment.