Seeing that one of the author's other articles is about how awesome the 360 is I would hold this a little below rumour at the moment. That being said it does make sense from a money standpoint for WalMart. Blu-ray will still be too expensive for WalMart at the end of the year but HD DVD could be cheap enough. Wal Mart doesn't make any money off of movie sales anyways and with Blu Ray out of reach all of those arguments are pointless. Even this Christmas is way too early to declare a victor in the format war so saying Blu Ray will be in the lead then is also somewhat beside the point.
If WalMart does this, and that's a big if, it would matter to mass market America which is where most sales will happen over time. Since overall sales of both formats will still be dwarfed by DVD in a year it could have a major impact in the format war (1 million sales for BluRay in 6 months? Wow, individual DVD's do that in a matter of hours). It may not win it outright for HDDVD but it could easily split the market between higher end BluRay and lower end HDDVD. As for Wal Marts clout elsewhere, America is the most important market and it is possible to split formats between regions like VHS and Betamax did.
I do find it funny though that Sony fanboys are so quick to call this competition for Sony when Sony has 5:4 advantage in sales (10:1 advantage in players isn't as important since they obviously aren't translating into movie sales, if they do it'll be more important) but the video game console race is too early to call despite being down 5:1.
