Thursday, January 31, 2019

Hollywood's Ultraviolet Digital Movie Locker To Shut Down

In a move to again raise the question of it you truly own those digital movie and TV titles you have purchased, Ultraviolet, the digital movie locker service which had acted as a cloud-based digital "locker" location for movies and television shows, is shutting down. Ultraviolet said on its home page that it will close on July 31, 2019. According to Ultraviolet, it is "working with retailers" to continue to make those digital movies and television shows available to consumers. Ultraviolet had been designed to let users stream digital copies of movies they had purchased across multiple, different streaming movie providers, on different applications, acting as a central digital hub. The central hub had stsored information on a users' right to stream movies and television shows. The shutdown comes as one of the primary backers of Ultraviolet, Disney, has launched its own, cloud-based movie streaming services, Movies Anywhere. Ultraviolet is also the basis for Walmart's Vudu movie service. According to Ultraviolet, users must "link" the movies and television shows on its service to a participating retailer, in order to continue to have access to those movies and TV shows--the service also suggested users link their libraries to "additional retailers" in order to avoid "potential disruption".