LAS VEGAS – The Ultraviolet consortium is nearly 70 companies strong and includes the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Netflix, IBM, Cisco, Best Buy, Adobe, Dell, Fox, Sony, NBCU, Panasonic, HP, Comcast, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sky, Liberty, and Cineplex.
Everyone but Apple, it seems, which is apropos, given the consortium’s goal is to set and release technical standards which would allow content owners to send their digital file for ingest once – and then for consumers to purchase a movie or TV show also just once (whether it’s a DVD, from their cable company, streamed or downloaded from the web) and be able to consume that content anywhere on any device.
This is different, of course, a bit different to Apple’s walled garden approach.
It sounds like an unwieldy, complicated partnership on the face of it but the Ultraviolet consortium told NAB delegates in Las Vegas on Monday that some titles with the UVVU brand, able to be shared across devices, will come to the market in DVD or download form in the U.S. by the middle of this year, with Canada and the U.K. to follow by the end of 2011.
The bottom line, say the executives backing the consortium, is that they want to make it easy for paying customers to pay once and happily view their favourite movie and TV shows on their TVs, smart phones, tablets, or PCs.
“This will provide a stronger element of choice and flexibility of where and when I consume my content,” explained Christopher Allen, Best Buy’s general manager.
Part of the vision is that a consumer could buy, for example, a Blu-Ray DVD of a movie from Best Buy and then through some sort of an authentication scheme being worked on by Akamai, be able to watch that movie on VOD on Comcast (if they’re a Comcast customer) for no additional charge.
Another portion of the vision is that consumers would also be able to take that DVD – or download – and copy it for viewing on up to 12 devices. “You can drag and drop it from your PC to your PlayStation,” said Scott Fierstein, Microsoft’s global director of technology interop affairs, citing an example. How that would be done is through the consortium’s “digital locker in the cloud” to where the end user would have a home account where they could copy their content.
However, the consortium’s work is on standards, building that secure locker and consumer authentication, not the business relationships, so in the Best Buy and Comcast example cited above, the two would have to work out a business deal covering such consumers and content.
Tim Dodd, the president of Neustar, which is driving the technology for the consortium, likened his role of building the digital locker in the cloud to providing the “plumbing” so that there can be “authentication of a user to a device to content.”
So while DVD sales are sliding and the executives on the panel agreed it will be a streaming world with everything in the cloud in five years or so, the companies do not want to ditch the physical format altogether because a sizable number of customers still like it – and they are in the business of providing choice. UV-enabled DVDs, “will come with the right of moving that content into the cloud,” added Dodd.
“It’s the evolution of what’s been offered before as electronic sell through,” added Sony Pictures SVP global digital strategy and operations Richard Berger.
“(Users) get digital rights that stand independent of a service.”
The UV consortium will also eliminate the hundreds of file formats that have to be created for viewing of a piece of content on the multitude of viewing devices and formats. That will almost eliminate ingest charges and make it completely simple for consumers to click and playback on whatever devices they have, in whatever ecosystem each consumer may have created on their own.
Unlike Apple, is what was left unsaid.
“Companies who are not at the top are not usually the ones who jump into standards,” said Fierstein.
But why are cable and satellite companies in on the consortium, it was asked. Don’t they normally want customers to only play in their sandbox?
“For a multichannel operator, consumers are increasingly aware of where the inputs are on their TV,” said Ultraviolet’s gm and executive director Mark Teitell. “That’s bad because every time (customers) do that (connect something else), it’s one more step towards erosion.”
However, the multichannel operators know consumers are going to look for content elsewhere no matter what, so they want to make things easy for their customer and then hopefully retain them. “They say ‘I don’t want to not be providing that to our customers’,” added Teitell.
