UltraViolet Digital Movie Locker is Shutting Down (theverge.com)

UltraViolet, one of the entertainment industry's first attempts at creating a comprehensive digital locker service, is shutting down on July 31st. Users should link their libraries to the service of at least one retailer which can then be used to access their films and TV shows after the shutdown. From a report: UltraViolet's days were numbered ever since Disney, the only major Hollywood studio not to join, launched its expanded Movies Anywhere locker service in 2017. Not only did it offer broad studio support, but it could also be connected to major digital retailers like iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, unlike UltraViolet. Additional resources: How to safeguard your UltraViolet library.

Comments

Such is the fate of all DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirates win again!

Moral of the Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Never trust the cloud.

Sadness

[duke_cheetah2003]

UV was a fantastic idea. It's a shame one studio can cause it's undoing.

This is not going to create any confidence in consumers interested in buying digital goods like music, movies, shows, etc.

If they're gunna keep pulling the rug out from under the consumer, you can bet nothing like this service will ever find success. You can only burn people so many times before they go 'no thanks, been there done that. got nothing to show for it.'

Re:Sadness

[Yaztromo]

Ultraviolet reinforced the concept that if you bought a license for a show or movie, that license was universal and entitled you to stream it from anywhere

The idea may have been good, but the implementation -- particularly outside the US -- sucked badly. Their software support to actually watch films was terrible, and by relying on third-parties to actually host the content, you were at their whim if they decided to stop making certain pieces of media available for download and/or streaming.

So it wasn't "one studio". UltraViolet had a myriad of issues that made it difficult to watch your content, severely degraded the audio and video of your content (in certain situations), and which made it difficult to watch your content on a variety of devices, and where content my simply disappear at any time.

As a consumer, it always cheesed me off if I bought a BluRay and found it had an UltraViolet code in it, as the experience was uniformly terrible. I've always had a much easier time with iTunes codes -- they work, are well supported, Apple always has the content, I can stream in HD even a year or two after entering the code, and the experience is always uniformly positive.

(Note that as I only get codes for each via physical media purchases, I am able to rip the content myself. At home I typically use the physical media for viewing, but if I want something on the road on my iPad or laptop, while I could transfer a copy I've ripped to the device in question it's always easier to just download or stream it from iTunes. That was never the case with UltraViolet).

Yaz

Physical Media FTW!

[imperious_rex]

THIS is why I always prefer physical media. When a movie or music album is literally in one's hands, they cannot take it away from you. Plus physical media can be easily loaned and borrowed between friends. When your media library is "in the cloud" on somebody's server, you don't really own the media. It's just available for you to lease or check out, not to own forever or to pass on to somebody else. When that service becomes defunct, so does your media library. Ooops! Physical media isn't without its problems (bit rot over time, physical damage, etc.), but I put more trust in a disc in my hand than in an account that could be shut down at any time.

Do you even know what it did?

[Solandri]

Ultraviolet reinforced the concept that if you bought a license for a show or movie, that license was universal and entitled you to stream it from anywhere So if you bought a movie on Fandango, you could use that license to view it from Vudu, and vice versa. No more having to dig through a half dozen streaming services trying to figure out which one you used to buy a particular movie. If you paid for the license, you could stream it from any of them (who supported Ultraviolet).

IMHO, a service like this should be a legal requirement for anything that's sold as a license instead of a physical product. It reinforces the concept that the digital licenses you buy belong to you, not to the service which happened to sell it to you.

Keep your own content and files!

[Rick Schumann]

Stop using 'The Cloud', it's stupid.