Your friendly neighborhood Walmart may perhaps be the best kept secret in the world of cloud and content management. Walmart is already the largest distributor of videos in the offline world, and now with the upcoming roll out of the disk to digital (D2D) initiative, it is turning into a content management vendor for videos in the cloud.

In early 2010, Walmart acquired "VUDU," a high-definition video-on-demand technology company, and made it part of Walmart Entertainment. Using VUDU’s technology, Walmart is launching (on April 16th) a service for customers to access their personal DVD collection on multiple devices for a fee of $2 per DVD.

Here is how the process works: you take your DVDs to a Walmart store to get linked to your account. After that you can watch them on multiple devices (computers, game consoles, internet TVs, mobile phones). You’ll need an internet connection for video downloading or streaming. For $ 5 per DVD, you can get access to high definition versions as well. You’ll need a special player for viewing on iPads and iPhones. The DVD you take to the store is marked with a special ink (it still plays) to prevent it from being used twice. 

The technology for storing (in the cloud) and keeping track of user rights to content is based on the Ultraviolet product, which supports multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Walmart has tied up with five major studios whose titles will be available. Disney is not one of them, AS it supports a competing product called KeyChest for DRM. 

You can think of this as outsourcing to Walmart your content migration to the cloud. I did not mention content archiving because this is not Walmart’s first foray into online video. An earlier attempt in 2007 partnership with HP fizzled fairly quickly.

It remains to be seen how well this D2D service fares in a competitive environment against Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others - that will determine the long term future of continued access to online content as well. 

So, what are some of the interesting things in this D2D initiative from a content management perspective?

• Multi-channel delivery is the big trend in the video world. Media Asset Management solutions can play a big role in this as the keepers / aggregators of metadata, but it is not a current focus area for them. 
• Content is king but acquiring rights is a big hurdle. (e.g., Star Wars movies are not available.)
• Online technology alone won’t suffice -- business processes need to encompass online and offline worlds (e.g. DVD verification, rights agreements)
• The world is not flat and geography is paramount (D2D is presently available only in the US -- global rights issues are another Pandora’s box)