On Monday Walmart announced it would partner with U.S. movie studio MGM to create content for its video-on-demand service, Vudu.  Walmart purchased Vudu studios in 2010 as a precautionary move for declining DVD Sales. Walmart anticipated that streaming services would have a major impact on the sales market and would cause many consumers to move to digital purchases. Vudu offers online streaming of Movies and TV shows and currently has 25 million registered users across its platform. However, the numbers of users is significantly less than the competition, and licensing content and producing original content has become a costly venture for many businesses.  Companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and even HBO have all reported cost of billions of dollars a year to maintain their content creation.

Vudu will create original series’ based on franchises from its extensive film and TV catalog and will be available on the studios free, ad-supported Movies On Us service. Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) is one of North Americas leading production companies with portfolio pieces including, James Bond, Rocky, RoboCop, Pink Panther, 21 Jump Street and The Hobbit franchises. The first original series for Vudu is scheduled to debut in the beginning of 2019 on Movies On Us.

This year, Vudu is planning to unveil a new interactive ad experience allowing viewers to make purchases via having more information sent to their email plus the ability to add an item directly to their Walmart cart while an ad is played. The announcement of this venture is planned for Wednesday at the NewFronts conference in Los Angeles, where executives will also be revealing the name of the first production created by the new partnership.