UltraViolet Backers See Content in the Cloud
There’s a new logo in the future of video lovers. Or at least that’s what many heavy hitters from the content, hardware and retailing worlds hope.
That would be UltraViolet, the name for a new format that is designed to break through what backers say are some key obstacles that are slowing down purchases of digital movies and TV shows. One of the biggest fears among consumers, they say, is that a movie they download or buy on disk will someday become lost or hard to access–because their computer or other hardware might crash, formats might change or other issues.
A consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content System, or DECE, has been working on a solution for some time now. They plan to offer a scheme under which consumers, instead of buying just a disk or a digital file, essentially buy a perpetual right to a piece of content. If they lose the original copy, there will always be one they can access in the cloud, as people in Silicon Valley like to put it.
