The big news today on the streaming front is NBCUniversal’s Fandango will acquire Walmart’s streaming movie service Vudu.
Not to worry though, the service will continue to run even after the deal closes within the next several months.
“While there will be many more exciting things to share in the months ahead, nothing about the Vudu experience is changing — your movie & TV library is safe, and you will continue to have access to all your Vudu apps across your favorite devices,” said Vudu in a blog post.
Fandando will use Vudu to leverage it’s own streaming movie service FandangoNow, hoping to compete with well-established video services such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Netflix.
Walmart purchased Vudu back in 2010. The streaming service has always been on the cutting edge of video delivery, offering titles with Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio as far back as 2015.
The company also tied in one of the best combo deals you could find. Select movies released early to digital could be purchased for a few dollars more and the corresponding Blu-ray or 4k Blu-rays would be shipped to the buyer upon in-store arrival. We’re not sure what will happen to Disc & Digital after the deal closes.
And, Walmart’s Disc-to-Digital service provided a great way to convert old Blu-rays and DVDs into Digital movies at a fair price. The new digital conversions were stored with Vudu (previously also with UltraViolet) so there is a question as to whether or not this service will continue.
Walmart says Vudu’s apps are installed in over 14 million mobile devices (although how many are active may be a point of contention) and the Vudu platform is available in over 100 million living room devices such as streaming media players, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players and TVs.
In related news, Comcast/NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock just recently soft-launched to Comcast customers with a hard-launch scheduled for July 15, 2020.
