Top 10 Film Industry Stories of 2011: #5
Lockers Go Digital
By David Mumpower
December 28, 2011
In other words, if you believe Green Lantern is not just the movie of the moment but in fact the cinematic triumph of our era (you scoff but this wouldn't be the strangest statement I've heard in my time at BOP), you can purchase the disc and thereby gain a code that grants you streaming access to the film for the rest of your life. And the eventual transaction here will be one between content creator and consumer sans the middleman, the retailer selling the physical media. Right now, Ultraviolet is functionally dessert with Blu-Ray the entree. What we have learned with iTunes and Amazon music rights and Netflix movie streaming is that physical copies are an inconvenience as much as a movie management solution. As is the case with food, the entree is what we eat but the dessert is what we want.
The other fundamental change in behavior in 2011 that ties into the cloud as well as the inconvenience of physical media is the sudden ubiquity of televisions, Blu Ray players and other media devices that include apps. Apps are another annoying buzz term in the zeitgeist right now, but their soaring popularity has happened for good reason. Apps are precise pieces of computer code that generally serve a single purpose. In the case of television apps and the like, the purpose is to allow the viewer to stream media content through various major providers. The Netflix app is a button click away from user access to Netflix. The Amazon Video link takes the user to their Amazon Video Library. And so forth. Anyone who buys a television from now on will be provided with immediate button click access to all of their digital lockers. This is the sort of instant gratification people desire.
The digital locker players of the moment are Vudu, Cinemanow, iTunes, Netflix and Amazon, with Flixster also becoming major players due to their direct ties to Ultraviolet. Netflix is the only one of the services that does not currently sell digital rights as well as rent them. Flixster is the reverse, its single purpose thus far being the provision of Ultraviolet content. All of the others rent as well as sell cloud-based content.
This difference is critical in that not every service is allowed to rent every title. There is a proprietary aspect to such transactions. Every title is made available for digital purchase, though. While Netflix is stuck streaming the titles for which they have rental agreements, the other major digital lockers have offer a much deeper selection of content to the user, as long as they are willing to pay for it, of course.
Through digital rights content purchase, a consumer has the ability to craft their own movie/television library stocked with the titles they love. This is no different from a DVD collection or the like, but the distinctive aspect is that no space is required in the living room. And the consumer is only a couple of remote control clicks away from instant access to any title in their collection. There is no need to get up and swap out discs. The storage is all done at an unseen server farm. Through the cloud and digital rights ownership with Ultraviolet (or the like), total media access is always at the customer's fingertips.
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