Looks like the push to go completely digital with your movie collection is about to get a major shot in the arm thanks to the biggest retail chain on the planet, Walmart. The retail giant announced this week that they will be partnering with VOD service Vudu (which they acquired in 2010) to offer consumers a new Disc-to-Digital Service. The upshot of the whole thing is that you will be able to bring in your DVDs and Blu-rays to your local Walmart and have them “convert” your movies to a digital copy that can be watched on almost any internet-connected device. The price of conversion will be $2 for a standard definition copy or $5 for HD. You still get to keep your physical copies, but you will now have unlimited access to the digital version for increased flexibility to watch whatever you want whenever you want. While it may not sound like a significant announcement, Walmart has already said that they are going to be putting a massive marketing campaign behind it, comparable to a blockbuster film launch. The question is, is this really something that consumers want?

At the moment, the program only supports movies released by the following major Hollywood studios: Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warner Brothers. Nevertheless, they are some powerful allies to have, and one of the reasons that they are supporting this initiative is because it still encourages consumers to buy physical copies of the movies. On the other hand, Vudu has over 15,000 titles available to buy or rent digitally, and it still allows the studios to sell individual titles and make more money than they would through Netflix.

Clearly Vudu is positioning itself to compete directly with Netflix and become your personal cloud-based digital library. This transition to digital has already happened with the music industry, and clearly it is going to happen with movies as well, the only question is when. Considering Walmart’s insanely wide reach, this could be the tipping point to start people giving up their DVD and Blu-rays for good. The Disc-to-Digital Service goes live on April 16th, 2012 in more than 3,500 stores. Do you think it will be a success? Is it something you might take advantage of yourself?