Walgreen Readies Movie DVD-Burning Kiosks
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Retailer will let customers download and burn their choice, easing the need for an inventory of discs.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has launched its long-awaited online movie download store, entering a market that has yet to catch on with consumers but is expected to grow rapidly
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Wal-Mart Stores announced Tuesday that it will launch its own video downloads service this week beginning with an exclusive "Superman Returns" DVD bundle containing a video download option with purchase of the physical DVD.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is launching its long-awaited online movie download store, entering a market that has yet to catch on with consumers but is expected to grow rapidly.
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Audio technology company is marking time before the next generation of DVD players arrives.
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Another Blu-ray player price cut is on the way.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc  on Friday  said it plans to exclusively back the Blu-ray high definition  movie format, the latest blow to the rival HD DVD camp backed  by Toshiba Corp .
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The new models, capable of storing up to 16 hours of high-definition programmes on a dual-layer, 50GB Blu-ray disc, will go on sale on November 8.
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The Walt Disney Co. said Wednesday it will release its movies and other content in the Blu-Ray format, one of the two major contenders for next-generation DVDs that will deliver high-definition images to TV sets.
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PC buyers can look forward to DVDs with up to 10 times the storage they now have when Hewlett-Packard rolls out machines supporting next-generation DVD technology next year.
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Starbucks will begin rolling out next week the in-store CD burning service it announced in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard back in March.
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Film studio Twentieth Century Fox, a  unit of News Corp., on Wednesday announced its first eight  movie titles that it will publish on the new DVD format called  Blu-ray and which will be on sale by November.
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Electronics companies are at war over next-generation DVDs
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NEW YORK - Hollywood's love affair with DVDs will face its biggest test beginning Tuesday as Wal-Mart unveils a movie and TV-show download service with participation by all major studios. New releases will be available at    www.walmart.com/videodownloads on the same day they come out on DVD and will cost up to $19.88. Older films will go for up to $9.88. TV episodes will be $1.96 the day after they air. Networks on board include Fox, CW and Viacom's MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo and VH1.
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(InfoWorld) - Tapping a new service from Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart joined a growing field of providers of digital video download services with the launch of an online movie store on Tuesday. The offering is built on HP Video Merchant Services, a Web-shopping technology also launched Tuesday that allows businesses to set up an online video store. HP holds hundreds of petabytes of digital films and TV shows in its data centers and provides back-office sales and search applications, said Willem de Zoete, vice president and general manager of Digital Entertainment Services at HP. Customers like Wal-Mart use the service as part of their online retail offerings, allowing cinema fans to browse movies based on genre or search by entering the name of an actor, director, or film. Customers can then download the movies to play on their PCs or portable video players or order a packaged disc to arrive in the mail, choosing a DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray format. A first-time user must install a program on the PC before starting the 30- to 45-minute process of downloading a 1.5GB movie over a typical household broadband connection, although most can start watching within five to 10 minutes, said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's divisional merchandise manager for digital media. Once the movie is downloaded, each user has the right to transfer it to three separate portable media players using Microsoft's Windows Media Player and to watch it an unlimited number of times. Customers who own media extender boxes can also play the digital file on TV screens, Swint said. The service will compete against Apple's iTunes store, which is limited to movies from Disney and Paramount in addition to TV and other programs. Other video download services are available from Amazon.com, AOL, Movielink, and CinemaNow. Microsoft also offers a movie and TV download service to Xbox users. Wal-Mart claims it has a market advantage over those sites since it offers movies from most of the major Hollywood studios and television networks. Compared to conventional movie rental stores, the digital movie rental industry is still struggling to build the size of its catalogs. Wal-Mart now sells about 3,000 of the movies and TV shows stored in HP's digital vaults and expects that number to rise quickly as content providers convert their own libraries to digital versions. "Today, the majority of movies are stored on tapes in buildings. That is a choke point at this moment in time. Part of my focus is to work with Hollywood studios to make movies available in digital file formats," de Zoete said. Another bar to building larger catalogs is that many obscure movie titles are never brought to the rental market if studios think demand is too small to sell the vast quantity of discs created in bulk reproduction batches, Swint said. That also stops retailers from taking advantage of the "long tail," the marketing theory that shops can make more money selling small quantities of each niche item than selling a large amount of trendy, short-lived items. To solve it, HP plans to offer "manufacturing on demand" in the future, opening up a huge catalog of old titles by producing a single disc to meet each online order. HP has started building a factory to do that work, and will add it to their Video Merchant Services package. In the meantime, Wal-Mart is selling new releases, which become available the same day as the DVD release, for $12.88 to $19.88. Older movies cost $7.50, and TV programs cost $1.96 per episode. DVD buyers will also have the option of paying an additional fee to download the digital version for playback on PCs and portable devices.
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Can the movie studios kill the most promising new DVD format?
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Film studio Twentieth Century Fox, a   unit of News Corp. NWS.N, on Thursday announced its first   eight movie titles that it will publish on the new DVD format   called Blu-ray and which will be on sale by November.