UltraViolet

» see uvvu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ultraviolet was a hollywood-studio consortium service for storing proof that you had bought a movie. it launched on october 11, 2011 with warner bros. releasing horrible bosses on blu-ray as the first ultraviolet title. inside the case there was a printed code. you went to a retailer's site like vudu or flixster, entered the code, and the movie appeared in your ultraviolet account, which then made it playable on whatever apps that retailer had integrated. the locker held only the rights, not the bits. it was an attempt at a federated drm model for the era when people still bought physical movies but wanted to watch them on a phone.

the service was operated by the digital entertainment content ecosystem, an alliance of around 85 companies including sony, universal, paramount, warner bros., and fox. lionsgate joined later. disney never joined. apple and google never directly integrated either. amazon ran a retailer that supported it for a stretch but did not put the ultraviolet locker behind its main video store. the alliance dissolved the cloud locker on july 31, 2019. at the time of shutdown there were thirty million accounts holding around three hundred million title rights.

i never had an ultraviolet code. the system was built around physical blu-rays bought at retail in the us and uk, and around the streaming-retailer apps that existed in those markets. neither the discs nor the apps had a meaningful turkey distribution. for me ultraviolet was a logo on the back of imported blu-rays in tech-blog photos, and a paragraph in the occasional article about why digital ownership was a lie.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the pitch made sense in 2011. people were buying blu-rays but watching most things on laptops and phones. studios did not want to compete with apple's itunes store on price, but also did not want apple to own the entire digital-movie distribution layer. ultraviolet was the compromise. it was a way to say to a consumer: you bought the disc, here is the digital copy that comes with it, and we will let you play it through any retailer who joins our consortium.

for the first few years it grew on the back of blu-ray packaging. by 2014 most major studio releases came with an ultraviolet code as standard. several million accounts had been created. retailers like vudu in the us and flixster integrated as playback endpoints, as did a smaller service called cinemanow. the british tesco-owned blinkbox supported it. the user experience was clunky in the way that any federated-rights system tends to be, but it worked.

~ the decline ~

three things slowly broke it. disney built its own service called movies anywhere starting in 2014, which by 2017 included disney, fox, universal, warner, and sony titles in a parallel locker that had cleaner apple and google integration. apple never joined ultraviolet directly, which meant the natural digital-purchase endpoint for tens of millions of users was outside the system. and the disc business itself was collapsing year over year, taking the natural ultraviolet acquisition channel with it.

in 2018 universal and fox stopped including ultraviolet codes in new releases, and lionsgate followed soon after. by january 2019 the dece announced the locker would shut down on july 31 of that year. users got six months to migrate their libraries to a participating retailer like vudu or fandangonow, which would keep the playback rights alive going forward. anything not migrated was simply lost on the cutoff date.

~ what came after ~

movies anywhere absorbed most of the surviving libraries. but ultraviolet is the cleanest object lesson in why "digital purchase" is not the same word as "purchase." you bought a disc, you redeemed a code, and eight years later the platform announced its sunset date and gave you a six-month window before your rights file evaporated. nothing was technically stolen. you were always renting access to a database that recorded that you were allowed to watch the file. the database closed.

the deeper lesson is about consortium drm in general. ultraviolet failed not because the cryptography was wrong, but because two of the biggest distributors in the world refused to plug in, and the others could not agree on a roadmap that would have brought them in. federated rights only work when the federation is complete. the moment one large participant goes its own way, the whole structure becomes a tax that consumers pay for nothing.

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