The death knell may not be sounding for physical media quite yet but the age of all-digital movie collections is about to get one step closer. It was announced today that UltraViolet, the studio-backed digital media format designed to unify all of your online movie purchases, will make its debut in the UK this month.
For those of you who don’t know their DRMs from their AVIs, UltraViolet is the studios’ answer to the question of how to future-proof your digital movie collection. It’s all very well when you can line up discs on your shelf, but when the box sets and special editions are all virtual, you still need a binary bookcase in which to keep them all. Which is where UltraViolet comes in.
Rather than having dozens of digital libraries that force you to spread your collection over half the Internet, the studios (and a whole bunch of others from manufacturers like Samsung to broadcasters like the BBC) banded together to agree on a single system that would allow people to keep a single virtual library for all their movies and TV box sets. Once in there, any of the titles you own can then be accessed via computer, smart phone apps, set top boxes and eventually games consoles and TVs themselves. The handy part is that the UV service can be seamlessly integrated into other services and websites, meaning you won’t need to bookmark the UV site in order to access it all.
You can buy movies in a digital-only format or, when you pick up a UV-branded DVD or Blu-ray, redeem a code inside to activate a digital copy of the film within your library. That's it in a nutshell, if you want the full technical rundown then take a look on the Wikipedia page but the long and short is that a single, universally agreed digital format makes complete sense and is, quite frankly, long overdue.
The system made its debut in the US in October and will hit British shores on boxing day with the release of Warner Bros’ Final Destination 5. Warner’s Senior VP and MD, Chris Law provided the studio’s official line thusly: “By making Final Destination 5 and all future WB theatrical new release titles UV enabled, we are offering consumers a simple and more compelling way to purchase, manage, access and share their movie collections digitally. This is just the first step, I'm confident we’ll be seeing more and more compatible content and services launching in the coming months”.
So is it time to retire your Blu-ray player, trash your DVD and start living your cinematic life out of the cloud? Not at all, but this is an important step towards finally taming the wild frontier of digital movies. It's a treacherous and unpredictable wilderness that up until now has only really been reliably traversed by the likes of iTunes and video-on-demand services like Netflix and LoveFilm; if UltraViolet is aiming to lay down the law and become the sheriff of digital video then that can only be a good thing.