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Data Storage Movies Technology

UltraViolet Digital Movie Locker is Shutting Down (theverge.com) 66

Posted by msmash from the for-the-record dept.
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.
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UltraViolet Digital Movie Locker is Shutting Down More

UltraViolet Digital Movie Locker is Shutting Down

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  • How to safeguard (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alypius ( 3606369 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @06:34PM (#58052480)
    The best way to safeguard your library is to rip the disc. This is just the latest service to go under or change their TOS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vanyel ( 28049 )

      This is exactly why I never do uncrackable drm'd media to start with. If I can't archive my own portable copy, I'm just renting it, not buying it.

    • If you don't have a DRM-free copy (Score:4, Informative)

      by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Friday February 01, 2019 @03:11AM (#58054016)

      You might as well have no copy at all. Fortunately DVDs and BluRays are easy to rip. Funny enough lots of people seem to share that opinion if you look at sales figures which go up once simple ways to rip became available.

    • True. Although a lot of people don't have DVD drives any more. And very few people have ever had blu-ray drives.

      Also the space taken up by movies, assuming you want no further degradation, is still non-trivial. Especially for blu-rays.

  • Such is the fate of all DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31, 2019 @06:36PM (#58052482)

    Pirates win again!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rlitman ( 911048 )
      Also the eventual fate of any cloud service that is ostensibly free, or paid for up front, relying on future sales, without any recurring subscription charges to support its long term maintenance.

  • Ulraviolet never had a day (Score:3)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @06:46PM (#58052528)

    Ultraviolet's days were numbered before it was ever released. It was a vaguely mediocre idea, completely ignorant of the reality of the internet that makes the service completely worthless, foisted upon the population by some of the upper echelon in the pantheon of Really Awful People.

    Good riddance, and may all their future endeavors end as this did.

    • Do you even know what it did? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @07:12PM (#58052666)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by trawg ( 308495 )

        If you paid for the license, you could stream it from any of them (who supported Ultraviolet).

        From a very quick read of the shutdown announcement [myuv.com] that sounds it sounds like they're trying to offer some continuitiy like that: "... in the majority of cases, your movies and TV shows will remain accessible at previously-linked retailers."

        Of course that doesn't help you if the retailer decides to pull the plug (which seems like the inevitable fate of all such services).

      • Not that I bothered often w/ it, but I just had a look...

        "Transferred" my licenses to Flixter which I'd already created an account on due to another of these services shuttering.

        Of the 5 movies that I have listed, only one is "available" on Flixter.

        So yay, I have preserved my license to view 4 movies that don't exist.

      • It reinforces the concept that the digital licenses you buy belong to you, not to the service which happened to sell it to you

        Pfffft. Do you have that signed, in writing, from everyone involved?

        Otherwise your license is just as good as the paper it's written on. Oh, it's located on a website? Let me change the terms for you then.

        That's a nice concept, but then how do we get paid multiple times for the "it's the same but it's different" content? Yeah, go away then.

      • 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

        ...for values of from anywhere that equal "within the United States".

        Very, very, very few services ever worked with UltraViolet outside the US, and many of those who did had limited libraries of content. And even fewer of those ever supported any sort of set-top streaming -- I have yet to find one that works in Canada for a set-top box, for example.

        I only buy movies on physical media (usually BluRay/DVD combo packs), and rip the DVDs to my media server for easy streaming. I've had a few UltraViolet codes,

      • 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

        Empty promises rarely fulfilled. It was always more profitable to sell you the same thing twice, possibly repackaged. What would have made it work is if you could then legally download bootlegged copies from anyone who chooses to host them, with no fear of legal retribution. Obviously that wasn't going to happen.

  • Moral of the Story (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31, 2019 @06:47PM (#58052532)

    Never trust the cloud.

  • Sadness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by duke_cheetah2003 ( 862933 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @07:02PM (#58052600) Homepage

    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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by kbonin ( 58917 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @07:27PM (#58052740)
      I suspect the real reason for its failure is more than just Disney not playing along, its more likely that most studios are now preparing their own walled gardens and are allowing any contracts that require them to play nice just expire. Studios want physical media to die so they can charge for their own streaming, and most consumers don't mind getting that 5 Mbps stream instead of 24 Mbps for Blue-ray or 25 instead of 128 Mbps for 4k UHD. Not to mention the data cap/NN elephant. As always, consumers lose, and arrgghh for the win!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        thats why all my media is on my NAS as home.

        Plex for the win!

      • My android chrome won't let me upvote this. Apple did this, not just Disney.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      It wasn't just Disney. With UV it was pretty much just UV. With Movies Anywhere it links to my Google Play account. MA will link with several, so I don't have to have a bunch of different apps.

      I purchase the physical discs, and the digital copies are just a handy convenience feature. It allows anyone in my family group to stream the movie without connecting to the home server thru VPN.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • UV had a share feature that MA doesn't have. You share or transfer to another UV user and you could not watch it until the license was returned. But no app existed to make that easy. If FB participated, it could've been great. And a reason for me to join Facebook.

    • Re:Sadness (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @08:37PM (#58052994) Homepage Journal

      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

      • 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.

        Which was why - at least on Amazon - I found that lots of discs which included UV codes were "accidentally" mis-advertised as including iTunes codes instead. Companies like Funimation repeatedly made this same "mistake" - I'm not sure if they ever corrected it, even after getting called on it.

        I don't like DRM; but at least Apple has made it reasonably transparent to the end user.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      I tried UV a few times over the years by entering in codes from purchased movies. It only gave access to SD streams. Even for SD, it was crappy quality. I was having flashbacks of watching watching pirated full length movies back from the 90s. Realtime called, wanted its compression algorithms back.

  • Physical Media FTW! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by imperious_rex ( 845595 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @07:03PM (#58052608)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by FangVT ( 144970 )
      I have physical discs of 3D movies. I can no longer buy a new TV that will show them in 3D. Nothing is safe.

      • Re:Physical Media FTW! (Score:4, Informative)

        by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Friday February 01, 2019 @02:58AM (#58053988) Homepage Journal

        FWIW, while you can't really buy a new 3D capable TV, the PlayStation VR can be bought new and can still display 3D movies.

        It's a different experience -- but you get a much bigger virtual TV size (the size is selectable, but at the largest size is like being at a movie theatre). Plus it will output the 3D signal to a 3D TV, and can automatically output a 2D image to a 2D TV while the VR headset is in use.

        That may or may not be your cup of tea, but it is something you can buy today that will play and display 3D BluRay discs.

        Yaz

    • THIS is why I always prefer physical media.

      I suspect most UltraViolet digital locker unlocks were from digital media purchases, as many BluRays have come with UltraViolet codes for digital copies.

      I always buy physical as well -- but have several UltraViolet (and a number of iTunes) "copies" that came with the media. And while I've long disliked UltraViolet with a passion, iTunes copies are quite handy to stream or download to an iOS, tvOS, or laptop, and always work the first time without a ton of screwing around.

      (As I've noted elsewhere, my experi

  • Ultraviolet had a feature where you could share your library with up to 5 people. This allowed me everyone in the family to have a combined collection of movies. I'm currently sitting at over 300 movies. I'd specifically by titles that were ultraviolet compatible so I buy it once and everyone in the family gets a coffee

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Well, I hope you learned the lesson.

      I see any digital content as, at best, a long-term lease, and price accordingly.

      I spent ages looking for a particular 1970's BBC sitcom online. You could get series 1 and 2 anywhere, series 3 was just non-existent online. But it was last filmed in the 1970's. It's played ENDLESSLY on the free digital TV channels. But you can't buy it.

      The only place that I could buy it from came along much later was the BBC Store. Literally, the second someone told me about it I was w

  • I've been plundering vudu's disc-to-digital program for a few years now. Get the app and go to dvdupc.com and enjoy $2 HD movie purchases.

  • Keep your own content and files! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @09:02PM (#58053104) Journal
    Stop using 'The Cloud', it's stupid.
    • So let's say you store your files locally. You have to maintain the drive every 2-5 years, power it, and organize it. Then ensure you have an easy way to play it from the tablet in the car, or at work, or... See the complexity? I've used Plex and it works well at home. Nowhere else without downloading ahead of time. Discs? Store 1000 discs? I watch waaay too much content for that. Piracy? Great way to cause a degradation in movie quality of big budget films and ruining blue collar jobs everywhere.

    • But, astonishingly convenient.

  • 1. It wasn't about Disney, it was about access. Movies Anywhere isn't Disney, it's iTunes (read up on Keychest). Now it's Amazon, Google, Walmart, Fandango, AND iTunes in the US. No matter Disney's content foothold in kids and nostalgia land, getting that multi-prong service doesn't happen without a major service provider. 2. "EST" in walled gardens was and is a laughable premise so there had to be a somewhat common garden. AT&Ts attempt at EST will fail without a shared license locker. Especially

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