One sign of the increasing momentum of the potentially giant snowball that is UltraViolet was yesterday’s Academy on UltraViolet in Los Angeles. The no-press-allowed event was, said the organizers, “a unique chance for the home entertainment industry’s key stakeholders to come together to determine how to ensure the success of UltraViolet technology”. The topic is now on the agenda for just about every content delivery conference, and the PEVE event in London had two consumer panels that highlighted the fact that the consumer, on the whole, is not that au fait with the initiative.
We went out to find out how both the driving forces behind UltraViolet and the end users view the progress. A market strength and something absolutely unique to UltraViolet is its relationship with the customer at the retail level. While some consumers have no trouble deciding that UltraViolet is a service that will cover many of their viewing needs, acceptance by consumers at large has been a little more mixed.
Here is a small selection of what we uncovered in our research:
- “No one but the Hollywood studios like the implementation. When you upload your movies to UltraViolet, they are no longer yours. You merely have the privilege to access them for however long they decide to keep the content and license servers running. And what do you have if this goes away? Nothing.”
- “Put a film in the cloud like this for $2 and it'll theoretically be there for you long after your kids are grown and you’re retired. That's not a feature you got when you originally bought the DVD/Blu-ray Discs. I like to think of this as the digital equivalent of buying an extended lifetime warranty.”
- “I just can't see driving to Walmart, walking a quarter mile across the parking lot and standing in line at a kiosk to get digital media for my device. That's too much old-school style shopping inconvenience for digital media.”
- “As for the convenience, considering that Walmart is the world's biggest retailer, most people go there once in a while anyway. The only inconvenience is remembering to bring the DVDs with you when you’re there to shop.”
The full feature will appear online and in the June issue of D2D.
