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What this means to you as a consumer is that you do not have to build your catalog entirely on your own. Your family, friends and other loved ones can be added as well. This allows a group of people to work together jointly in order to build a full catalog of titles. I currently have another webmaster at BOP who is like a brother to me listed as well as my wife and family accounts for each of our households. If any of them ever purchase a DVD or Blu-Ray that has an Ultraviolet license, they add it and every member on the account gains immediate access to the film.

In this regard, library creation is a joint venture rather than a sunk cost for only one person. Such generosity is wholly out of character for the studio system and worthy of tremendous praise. After all, we all line up to cast stones on the many occasions when distributors blithely screw customers such as with the re-release of movies in each new format. Ultraviolet is at least somewhat of a move away from such behavior.

I am not naïve enough to believe that there are not further plans in the offing that again attempt to re-sell the same content to users. What I will say is that if something is in my Ultraviolet library in HD, I give the movie no further thought in terms of purchase. This was not the case with DVD or even Blu-Ray. I always knew in the back of my mind that I would wind up buying those titles again at some point down the road. With Ultraviolet, the fear is alleviated.

The other fantastic aspect of Ultraviolet is the focus on portability. I have downloaded the Vudu and Flixster apps, both of which provide the user direct access to the Ultraviolet library. This affords me the ability to play my accumulated titles from my iPad or iPhone when I am not home. The process is seamless and the connectivity is strong.

The picture quality is also quite a bit better than I had anticipated, although I should note that I do not have the latest generation of iPad. The high quality screen resolution on version three may hurt rather than help picture quality in the same way that watching a standard definition movie on an HDTV can be a brutal experience. Then again, you are watching a movie on a portable tablet/phone. Appreciate the miracle of this rather than focusing on the negatives!

Now that you have an Ultraviolet account and the ability to watch your programming from anywhere on Earth that has a cell tower nearby, let’s talk cloud seeding. I mentioned before that you will want an account with either Flixster or Vudu. The why of this is simple. Ultraviolet provides no direct methodology to view programming. You need a program designed to display the contents of your library. For the purposes of this column, I will focus on Vudu since I previously recommended it as the finest choice for movie cloud seeding.

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