For all the chatter that digital media is supplanting the physical, that’s still far from true when it comes to buying and owning movies. Though sales of DVDs have fallen over the past few years, they still totally dwarf digital sales.
But now, Hollywood and a consortium of technology firms are finally ready to present a solution they’re calling Ultraviolet, which will let you buy a film once and watch it anywhere.
It’s a prospect vastly different from the current situation, which could only generously be described as completely absurd. Today, buy a movie from iTunes and it only works on Apple hardware. Similarly, get one from Sony or Microsoft, and it only works on their stuff. Even that not-quite-legitimate copy of a movie you ‘found’ isn’t safe: it too has to be in the right format for your hardware. For your average user, it’s a total mess.
Ultraviolet tries to fix this in two ways: first, it gives users a ‘digital locker’ in which you can store all your purchased movies online, making them accessible anywhere; and secondly, all the players involved have agreed on common technological standards. The list of participating companies is impressive. It includes major movie studios like Warner Bros. and Paramount, software companies like Microsoft and Adobe, and hardware manufacturers like Sony and Toshiba. What’s more, they’ve all spent over 3 years hammering out various technical and licensing issues to ensure it all works seamlessly.
The way the system would function is that you’d purchase a physical or digital copy of a movie and it would come with an “enduring right to access your content on any UltraViolet device registered in your Household Account.” That means you could buy a movie once, and it would work on your Blu-Ray player, your computer, your mobile phone, tablet or any other compatible hardware, ostensibly for life.
If that sounds a little too good to be true, it’s because it might be. One issue is that a small, obscure Californian company called Apple Inc. aren’t on board with Ultraviolet. Given the hold Apple has on both digital media and the popular consciousness, it’s possible that when consumers learn these movies won’t work on iPhones or iPads, they’ll be turned off. Making matters worse is that Apple have built a business on their own closed ecosystem; getting them to change their minds won’t be easy. Secondly is that streaming video from the cloud consumes a tonne of bandwidth. A streamed HD movie can easily eat up five or six gigabtyes—about a tenth of most Canadians’ monthly allotment—which may make Hollywood’s plan a lot less viable in Canada unless Rogers and Bell et al change their ways.
Still, assuming those problems get sorted—and the pricing isn’t exorbitant—this could be just the sort of digital future we were promised: media, everywhere. Yet though this all sounds great in theory, there is another thorny issue to the plan, and it has more to do with culture than technology or economics. To wit, do people still want to own movies?
After all, services like Netflix have suggested that people may be happy to supplant their film buying with an ever-revolving selection of streaming titles. Similarly, as we’ve reported before, the limitless nature of the cloud is changing the idea of ownership itself, as people become less concerned with collecting and simply seek the occasional gem in a never-ending flood.
Either way, we’ll be able to see how the system works for ourselves soon enough. Ultraviolet compatible devices and titles are set to launch this fall, and new partners continue be announced. And if it all works as advertised, it may finally make buying a digital movie a viable proposition.
