A couple of weeks ago, we attended an Enterprise Forum at Caltech on the entrepreneurship and consumer opportunities that the upcoming Ultraviolet initiative will present. Ultraviolet is a very exciting dream for consumers as its goal is to eliminate the hassle of transcoding your content from one device to another, especially when you have multiple people in your household. The idea is that you’ll buy something like a movie once on Blu-Ray once and that you’ll be able to watch it wherever you are on any device that supports Ultraviolet. It’s a very ambitious goal, but it’s definitely one worth working towards.
Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) President Mitch Singer gave a short keynote going over the impetus behind forming Ultraviolet, an explanation of the service’s infrastructure, and showed some use cases that will become possible with the platform.
Over 70 companies are part of the consortium, with many of them feeling that the content retailing business needs a “do over.” Mr. Singer summed up the thinking behind forming Ultraviolet with one question: “If we had to do it all over again from a consumer experience, what would that consumer experience be?” It’s rare that you see companies such as Sony or Microsoft or even any of the Hollywood studios admit they messed up, but here they are. It remains to be seen whether this realization has come in time, but as a consumer, it’s refreshing to hear that these corporations are at least thinking about things from our perspective.
One of the biggest technical decisions the consortium has made so far is the standardizing of one file format and DRM system. According to Mr. Singer, this will create efficiencies in the backend services by cleaning up a lot of the clutter of having to serve up multiple file formats. It’ll also make it easier for device manufacturers to guarantee compatibility across companies. (buying content on a Sony device and transferring over to a Microsoft one, for example) If you’ve been following digital distribution the past few years, another way of looking at it is would be as a sort of mega-”PlaysForSure” program that works across more companies’ devices.
Since Ultraviolet allows you to name up to six authorized users, he gave the hypothetical situation of buying a Blu-Ray of Spiderman 4 at home and calling his son up at college to let him know that he could also watch the movie immediately. Another possibility would be to have Best Buy pre-load all of your purchased movies and content on purchasing a new laptop before you even left the store. The most interesting case he detailed was an Ultraviolet enabled airplane entertainment service that would automatically load up the movies you own and want to see at your seat. That’s actually pretty darn cool. I don’t know about you, but I invariably spend an hour or two transcoding content to my iPad before I leave for the airport. Cutting that step out would be awesome.
Obviously, when one looks at the list of companies in the Ultraviolet alliance, the absence of Apple, Disney, and Google are big ones. One of the audience members asked Mr. Singer to address this, to which he replied that talks have been on going with those companies. He gave reassurances that whether or not Apple’s iTunes store decides to play nicely with Ultraviolet, there would be apps built for the iPhone/iPad that will allow you to access Ultraviolet content that you’ve purchased. Their overall hope is that once Ultraviolet becomes the dominant standard in content retailing, Disney and Apple will want to join in the party. After all, if they have all the other major content providers and device manufacturers on board, they do have a very compelling array of goods for consumers.
From the way Mr. Singer answered the question, it seemed as if Google was still at the negotiating table with the consortium and that of the three major absent companies, it would be the most likely one to join in the near future. While it’s still disappointing that these companies aren’t a part of the alliance, it shouldn’t come as too big of a shock to anyone. The biggest issue I would have had would be the sheer amount of Apple devices out there, but as long as Ultraviolet content plays on them, Apple’s absence shouldn’t be too big of a concern.
On the entrepreneurial front, it sounded like there could be some cool opportunities for startups to work within the ecosystem. Since all of the licensing and content encoding/delivery is already taken care of, entrepreneurs can concentrate on providing customer facing services without having to invest the time and money to integrate with the backend infrastructure. For example, a company that’s really good at providing targeted point of sale experiences could build touchscreen kiosks to sell movies at every CVS location without having to worry about raising $100 million to license content and develop the underlying content delivery system. With Ultraviolet as a modular platform, startups can pick which part of the platform they want to build on, whether it be customer facing or on the backend.
We’re a little worried that it might be too daunting for a startup to work on this platform in the near future due to risky timing, though. Ultraviolet is set to launch sometime this summer or fall and if you’re a startup who wants to get in the game, it’s going to be at least a year or two before your product is built out and implemented. Plus, if for some reason the initiative doesn’t stick around long term, you’ve wasted a ton of resources on a defunct platform.
For all our sakes, though, I hope Ultraviolet does end up being successful. Despite all the different pieces that have to fall into place correctly, it could end up revolutionizing the content business in an extremely positive way.
Here’s a short video of the panelists’ introduction. Please excuse the video quality as we work with Caltech in getting a better clip for you to see.
