by Abe Abrahamian---7.14.12
Ultraviolet Movie Digital Rights Management
The future of online content delivery is from Ultraviolet. Why? Because the major studios all have signed on with the exception of one, Disney. They soon will follow. Netflix has failed their customers with online content delivery. The movies that are available on Netflix are old and terrible in terms of content. The only good aspect of Netflix online streaming is the TV shows that are available. Hollywood is in full control of delivery their movies. The majority of the studios now hold back rental of Blu-ray discs for 28 days forcing you to buy the movie or wait for rental.
Apple, Google, and Amazon offer movies for rental and purchase online. However, they do not have a system in place that allows consumers to backup their personal DVD and Blu-ray movie content. Apple got it right with the music industry however they have failed with their business model on movies. A new Apple Television will not work other than it being a giant iPad with AppleTV built-in. Unfortunately Google has followed the same path with movies and so has Amazon.
Hollywood is fighting back with their own system that is slowly building in popularity. Currently the DVD Copy Control Association has won the lawsuit against a high end movie server company by the name of Kaleidescape. This lawsuit pertains to good old fashioned DVD discs. To store your Blu-ray movies via a Kaliedescape server requires an expensive multidisc changer to store your Blu-ray movies to allow for playback via the hard drive based server. Expensive and complicated for the average American.
Blu-ray movies now are being released with the ability for that movie to be stored in the cloud. This new system is called Ultraviolet. You simply sign up for a new Ultraviolet account and add the code for the movie you just purchased. This movie is then available for streaming online and to mobile devices. Vudu and Flixster have joined forces with Ultraviolet to allow playback of your movie personal content. Most importantly Vudu is owned by Walmart. They now have a program in place called Disc-to-Digital, where you can take your old DVD movies and Blu-ray movies and convert them to Ultraviolet. It costs $2 to convert to SD content and $5 to convert to HD content.
Apple, Amazon, and Google must consider the possibility that Hollywood is winning this battle and they should implement the UltraViolet system.