Advanced Television

Wal-Mart set to confirm UltraViolet support

March 7, 2012

By Colin Mann

As reported by advanced-television.com on February 28th, further reports have emerged that US retail giant Wal-Mart is set announce its support for the UltraViolet digital movie technology at a media event to be held in Los Angeles next Tuesday.

As the nation’s biggest seller of DVDs – responsible for up to 40 per cent of all DVD sales in the US – Wal-Mart’s support is seen as vital in boosting the digital content ownership ecosystem.

Wal-Mart would sell Ultraviolet-enabled copies of movies through Vudu, the online video service that it acquired in 2010. Consumers would also be able to bring copies of DVDs they own into stores. For a small, but not yet determined fee, Wal-Mart employees would give those customers a copy of the movie in their UltraViolet account.

Such an approach, described as ‘disc-to-digital’ by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group President Kevin Tsujihara at Morgan Stanley technology, media and telecoms conference in San Francisco on February 29, would be critical to boosting use of UltraViolet.

Reports also suggest that CE retail specialist  Best Buy will offer a similar in-store scheme. Best Buy and Vudu are members of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the consortium of major Hollywood studios, consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers, network hardware vendors, systems integrators and Digital Rights Management (DRM) vendors backing the ecosystem.

Categories: Articles, CA/DRM, Content