Walmart Will Turn Your DVDs & Blu-Rays Into Digital Movies For $2

If your shelves are getting cluttered with DVD and Blu-Ray boxes, Walmart has a (legal) solution: Starting April 16, customers can bring in their physical copies of movies and get a digital version stored in the UltraViolet cloud for $2 each.

The cloud storage system will offer access from a variety of Internet-connected devices, says L.A. Times, and high-definition upgrades for standard DVDs will be available for $5 each.

Walmart announced the news as part of an exclusive arrangement with five Hollywood studios. It’ll be the only store with the “disc-to-digital” offering until their deals ends in the fall.

They’ve also revealed that they’re backing UltraViolet, an online movie technology touted by most movie studios and many technology companies. As part of the deal, Walmart’s online video store Vudu is part of UltraViolet, which is trying to compete with Apple’s iCloud film service.

It’ll be a boost for UltraViolet, say movie executives from 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. and they say it’ll help get consumers used to storing their existing movie collections online.

Photo center employees at Walmart will be responsible for taking your discs and adding digital copies to Vudu accounts, and will stamp the disc when it’s done so as not to allow multiple copies of a movie. Rented DVDs won’t be accepted. Some movies won’t be able to convert, as many studios don’t have digital copies of their films yet, so your shelves might not be so bare all at once.

Wal-Mart in exclusive deal to convert DVDs to digital for $2 each [L.A. Times]

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