In recent years I have been buying, what the trade call, triple play movies
With most of the films I bought the digital copy was in an iTunes format. This was fine with me as I already used the iTunes ecosystem for music and video.
More recently, well since December 2011, I have noticed is that the trend now is to use Ultraviolet.
UltraViolet (UV) is a digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system that allows users of digital home entertainment content to stream and download purchased content to multiple platforms and devices. UltraViolet adheres to a “buy once, play anywhere” approach that allows users to store digital proof-of-purchases under one account to enable playback of content that is platform- and point-of-sale-agnostic.
In theory what you do (in the UK) is sign up to Flixster and then you can redeem your Ultraviolet code and watch or download your movie.
I say “in theory” as I haven’t actually managed to do this process. The first time I signed up, I think I some how managed to sign myself up as an American. This would have been pointless as I wouldn’t have been able to access my “UK only” films. There was also no way to change your country. this is obviously to stop regional piracy. I do think that these “piracy” measures are short-sighted, as what they are actually doing is stopping me, an actual customer who has paid for the film, from watching the film; whilst the actual pirates wouldn’t even worry about such things, probably using a copy from the film studio or similar…
I have to say that is one thing that does annoy me after spending my hard earned cash on a DVD or Blu-Ray the first thing I see (and usually you can’t fast forward or skip it) is a clip telling me not to pirate films… Hello? I bought the film, I didn’t pirate it, I bought it, why tell me something I already know and do. If I pirated a film, I wouldn’t see that clip would I, so why show customers who are honest, want to watch the film, a stupid clip telling them to buy films… they did. I wouldn’t mind so much, but half the time you are “forced” to watch the clip, as they have restricted the capability to skip or fast forward the clip. Why don’t they put that clip on pirated films?
So back to Ultraviolet, so of course I tried to sign up again, and it wouldn’t let me, as I had already signed up… When I tried a different e-mail address, that didn’t work it timed out. In the end I gave up.
I think part of the problem was that I was trying to do all this on my iPad. Why the iPad, well I wanted to watch the film on the iPad.
I think the best option will be to do it all on a PC and then hopefully, if Ultraviolet will allow it, then it will let me access the films on the iPad.
Couldn’t agree more on the annoyance of “pointless” DRM measures. It’s been an issue in software since the early 80s with the silly colour code protection systems used on computer games of the time, where again, pirated copies either removed it altogether or made it much easier to get past. The ONLY 2 reasons for such things I think are:
1) To make money for the companies who make the technologies
2) for the content makers to feel it imbues their product with more of a feeling of worth in their consumers. (E.g. “It must have been worth me spending £££ on this bit of plastic with bits encoded on it which cost a few pence to mass produce because the /content/ is so precious that they’ve gone to all that effort to try to protect it” – the difference between cost/value/worth)
The later is the only reason I can think of for movies preventing you skipping pointless messages about (c) “theft” (which is actually a lie/myth anyhow…it’s a tort, not theft apparently).