WAL-MART ADDS MOVIE STREAMING TO WEBSITE

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has added streaming movies to its website as the world's largest retailer attempts to grab a bigger share of the online movie market from rival service Netflix Inc.

The decision to offer movie sales and rentals through Walmart.com comes just two weeks after Netflix raised prices for the majority of its customers. The price hike provoked howls of protest from consumers and disappointing subscriber growth projections, leading to a significant drop in Netflix's stock price.

Wal-Mart, long the nation's leading seller of DVDs, signaled its intent to double down on digital movie distribution in February 2010, when it spent a reported $100 million to acquire Vudu, a Silicon Valley start-up that was gradually being added to home entertainment devices.

Since the acquisition, Vudu has been able to leverage the giant retailer's clout with manufacturers to incorporate is service into more than 300 consumer electronics products, including Internet-connected television sets, Blu-ray disc players and the Sony PlayStation 3 game console.

This spring, Vudu began offering movie rentals and purchases via the Web, through Vudu.com, positioning the service to better compete with the likes of Amazon.com, Apple Inc.'s iTunes or Blockbuster.

Offering 20,000 movie titles for rental and purchase through Wal-Mart's website, which attracts about 40 million monthly visitors, is a further step in that direction. It better positions the retailer to take on established online players, as well as traditional competitors such as Best Buy, which last may bought digital video service CinemaNow.

On Wal-Mart's website, the movies will be available the same day the DVDs go on sale in stores. Rental prices range from 99 cents to $5.99. Digital purchases are priced from $4.99 to $24.99.

NETFLIX RAISES PRICES, INTRODUCES NEW PLANS

Netflix announced two new unlimited DVD plans on Tuesday, including a $7.99 option for one DVD at a time and an $11.99 option that allows users to rent two DVDs at a time. The company also said that it will discontinue its current $9.99 monthly option that provides access to unlimited DVD rentals and unlimited instant streaming each month. Instead, the movie rental service will charge users $7.99 a month for unlimited streaming and a minimum of $7.99 per month for unlimited DVDs (with one rented out at a time at that rate).

Essentially, that means users with the current $9.99 offering will instead have to cough up $15.98 per month in order to maintain their current subscription plan. “Reflecting our confidence that DVDs by mail is a long-term business for us, we are also establishing a separate and distinct management team solely focused on DVDs by mail, led by Andy Rendich, our Chief Service and Operations Officer and an 11 year veteran of Netflix,” the company said in a blog post. Netflix’s current plans will expire in September, and users will need to switch to a new plan by that time.

REDBOX RENTING GAMES FOR PS3, XBOX 360 AND WII

Exactly as promised, Redbox is today inaugurating a new branch to its media-renting venture with the introduction of video game rentals at $2 a day. There's a pretty rich and fresh selection on offer, including the likes of Duke Nukem Forever, Dirt 3, and Brink, and you can reserve your copy online before moseying down to your nearest Redbox kiosk to execute the transaction. About 5,000 of those crimson encasements have already been partaking in the testing of this service, but now Redbox is flipping the switch on the other 21,000 across the US and making things officially official.

WARNER BROS. TO RENT MOVIES VIA FACEBOOK

If you were looking for something more worthwhile to spend Facebook credits on than virtual trinkets for some game, Warner has an idea: all those movies you said you "liked." Starting today it is testing out a plan to rent movies right on their respective pages for 30 Facebook credits / $3 each. The first one on deck is The Dark Knight (again?) which should be live later today, with more available to rent or purchase in the future. there's no word on resolution or other features, but at the price we're assuming SD only. Full details are in the press release after the break, but the rentals have the standard 48-hour VOD window and can be paused/resumed simply by logging back into Facebook.

AMAZON BUYS UK MOVIE STREAMING/RENTAL SERVICE LOVEFILM

Amazon has just announced it has agreed terms to buy up all the remaining shares of Lovefilm it didn't already own. The British outfit operates a subscription-based movie rental and streaming service in its home market along with Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and should give Amazon a very solid base from which to build its presumably Netflix-besting ambitions. Lovefilm has been just about the closest thing Europe has had to the ridiculously successful North American movie distributor and Amazon is arguably getting in just in time, given Netflix's overtures toward expanding into the UK. Customary closing conditions will need to be met before the final stamp of approval is applied, but the acquisition is expected to complete by the end of Q1 of this year.