Hasta La Gadget!

Wal-Mart on Monday confirmed that it will purchased online movie service Vudu for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is expected to close in the next several weeks.

“The real winner here is the customer,” Eduardo Castro-Wright, vice chairman for Wal-Mart, said in a statement. “Combining Vudu’s unique digital technology and service with Wal-Mart’s retail expertise and scale will provide customers with unprecedented access to home entertainment options as they migrate to a digital environment.”

Wal-Mart said that Vudu will continue developing entertainment and information delivery solutions like Vudu Apps, its delivery platform for Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players. Vudu currently has a library of 16,000 movies and licensing deals with almost every major studio, as well as independent distributors.

“We are excited about the opportunity to take our company’s vision to the next level,” said Edward Lichty, Vudu executive vice president. “Vudu’s services and Apps platform will give Wal-Mart a powerful new vehicle to offer customers the content they want in a way that expands the frontier of quality, value and convenience.”

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, Vudu announced that it would abandon its hardware business for partnerships with established manufacturers. Sharp, Sanyo, and Toshiba said they would release products like Blu-ray players and HD TV’s with built-in access to the Vudu service. Prior to CES, Vudu was available in about eight products from LG and Mitsubishi – a number that jumped to 50 at the annual electronics conference.

The year of the set-top box continues with the release of the frighteningly-named Monsoon Volcano. This sleek back box combines several useful features, including time-shifting, recording, and Internet streaming. Use it to schedule and record programs, then transfer them wirelessly to your smartphone. The company will offer electronic program guide apps for the major smartphones, so that you can set recordings remotely, as well.

The Volcano also let you surf the Web on TV and watch YouTube videos and purchased or rented movies from CinemaNow. Other video apps, such as Boxee, will be added through the year, the company says. Look for the Volcano in March in two configurations: a $199 version with 4GB flash memory and a $299 version with a 250GB hard drive.

One day after officially announcing the D-Link Boxee Box, the networking company has another media player to talk about: The new D-Link Pebble is mainly for playback of all the media you already own, and the Boxee Box concentrates on playing media from every corner of the Internet, but both have a lot of overlap. Like the fact that they’re tiny compared with past players that were the size of DVD players, and neither includes built-in storage.

The $119.99 Pebble, which should be on sale early this year, is small, football-shaped, and shiny. It looks for media on Flash memory drives, network-attached storage, PCs on your network, and out on the Internet. Its graphical interface should make it easy to find your files for streaming, but details aren’t out on the all file types it will support. It connects via Ethernet, but there’s an extra option for an 802.11n dongle. Output is HDMI 3.1 or analog video and composite audio.

The Boxee Box by D-Link, on the other hand, goes for right angles and glowing greens. The design, by the same people behind the Xbox 360 and Alienware, was revealed last month at a Boxee event. It has most of the same connections plus an SD card slot and SPDIF audio. Of course, Boxee is all about the software/service for streaming video over the Internet. It will also come with a radio frequency remote control. Boxee partners include Pandora, Last.FM, and Suicide Girls. No price has been announced yet, but it should be on sale early this year as well.