bruceames

All that fine print basically means is that service providers may one day charge a fee to recoup their costs of streaming the movies. It would probably be something like what Netflix does today, an a la carte monthly service fee. It would be unreasonable to expect service providers to offer free streaming of your movies forever. Streaming is basically a feature of UV, not the end all be all.

And since UV is an ownership format, the real teeth in the "ownership" will be in the movies you download to compatible devices once the CFF format comes out. Those you can play without any internet connection.

PhantomStranger

The explanation is UV digital service providers will jack up rates, once the studios stop subsidizing the service after the concept is firmly established and has taken away enough business from physical media. Walmart didn't buy out VUDU to run a charity.

I have a couple hundred movies in my UV collection, but I have no doubts that VUDU will eventually charge access fees to my collection in a few years.

bruceames

Keep in mind that VUDU and other service providers can still provide free streaming of your UV collection by making money from selling and renting movies. There will be plenty of competition among providers and those that end up getting used more will probably get more rental/purchase business.

Alan Smithee

But why would I want to watch a movie on my computer? I have my laptop connected to my home theater system (that's how I'm typing this right now), but the quality from that still won't be as good as a Blu-Ray disc, or even through Vudu on my TV. I'm talking about buying a movie on Vudu, then accessing it on someone else's Vudu device. Unless I permanently register that device to my account (and you can't switch back and forth between accounts after that), I can't share movies on it. Better to just bring the disc over. And if they EVER start charging a fee just for ACCESS, that will be the final deal-breaker, even if they get the presentation quality equal to or better than Blu-Ray. One reason I don't advocate 'digital ownership' that you already need internet service to access your stuff that way (and I know someone's gonna tell me I need to pay for electricity to watch my media, but I don't consider that the same thing, besides you need that for both anyways.)

I'll agree that collections are getting saturated by this point- I've nearly run out of shelf space and have had to get creative with anything I've acquired recently. If studios want to keep selling stuff though, they need to keep making it exciting to consumers. That means not cheapening out on the packaging- especially getting rid of those awful Eco-Cases, and stop using plain grey printing on the discs. If you make it look pretty, you can sell anything. A lot of recent releases I've opened up just give me the impression the studios are saying "We don't care about this anymore." And one reason for that, according to an interview with Bill Hunt I heard recently, is that the people who ran studios' home video departments when DVD first came about were real movie fans. Since then they've either moved on or been fired, and their replacements have been more bean-counters than anything else.

hanshotfirst1138

Obviously it won't be the same kind of thing, but I'm wondering if some kind of "streaming wars" will occur since they're trying to avoid Apple, different distributors want different things, etc.

Will it seem attractive enough to cripple the physical media market completely? Because that's looking pretty likely at the moment.

Oh, I think the average person doesn't much care, I'm sure they take it at face value. I think that if that kind of thing does happen, some John Q Publics might be in for rude awakenings. But that's if it does happen.

The best being relative to what you're hoping for, as digital ownership not gaining traction wouldn't exactly bother me. What about Disney?

To be fair, what this means right now might be nebulous, and they might just be trying to cover their asses. The technology is still progressing, what will happen remains to be seen.

In other words, it looks good to entice people, and once they've moved oer, the policy will change?


To be fair, you can watch Vudu and some other streaming stuff on other deceives. Now, Apple not so much because of iTunes vice-like DRM death grip on my nuts, which is irritating, but that seems to be the exception, at least at the moment. It probably has something to do with why studios don't much like Apple, I'm sure.

Art of any and all kinds exists at the whim of money. It always has, and it always will. Is that how it should be? No. But it won't change at any point in human history. And the mainstream will eat anything that has profit-making potential, which would be everything in the entertainment industry. Do I wish that DVD and Blu-Ray still had cool packaging, inserts, and cool designs on the discs? Yeah. But it's more important to me the content on the discs themselves is what I want. Since we're looking at neither, only one is a problem.

Sub-Zero

September 7:

bruceames

I think you're allowed to have 5 devices enabled at the same time. So if you have less that that enabled you can enable your account on a friends device, watch movies on it, and dis-enable it later (through your account on the UV home page).


However, better to just bring along an already-enabled Roku stick or other device that's convenient and plug it in to his/her TV. Besides, your friend may not have a streaming device connected already.

TheBigDave

Vudu recently upgraded the limit to 8 devices.

It's pretty easy to enable a new device. Just load the Roku app and it gives you a code to enter on the Vudu website. Afterwards, just go to the Manage Devices page at Vudu and click "Deactivate Device".

Gizmo

So...anyone with a large library want to be my "friend"?

Alan Smithee

PhantomStranger

You could always put a want ad up in the trading forum. I'm sure some enterprising soul wants to sell their friendship.

orangerunner

I really like the packaging for the old DVDs. You can tell there was a lot of time, care and effort that was put into the design and look of them.

I have many DVDs that I really don't care to upgrade to Blu-ray because of the comparison between the great DVD packaging and the crappy eco-case Blu-ray.

"If you make it pretty, you can sell anything" in the context of physical media will work in some instances with films that have that fanboy base.

More commonly, many people are selling their entire collection on craig's list usually with the reasons listed as "I ran out of storage", "I'm a Netflix-guy now", "Wife thinks they look ugly and 'man-boyish' in our living room" etc.

Many others are tossing the packaging away and placing 400 discs in 3-ring binder.

I can see why the studios are questioning how effective fancy packaging is for large runs or titles which don't have a collector-minded fanbase.

bruceames

Cool, nice to know. I wanted to enable a 6th device a while back and ended up having to remove a device that wasn't being used from the list. Also, didn't occur to me but that's just VUDU, which is just one service provider (although the most dominant one by far), and is not a restriction of UV itself. I was thinking that adding a friend meant having one less device to have for yourself, but now I see that the "friends" list is indeed a part of UV itself and that up to 5 friends can be added there. Correct? And if so, do they have the same device limits as the master owner? I'm curious to check this friends program out to see how it works!

hanshotfirst1138

My collection takes up a lot of space in my bedroom, but I figure if I buy the proper storage unit, it won't be too big a deal. But perhaps I'm deluding myself.

fitprod

So explain to me why I was not given an option to transfer over all of the digital copies I had access through Disney Movie Rewards? They were free and anyone who had actually purchased stuff was given an option for a refund within a specific time period, when they decided to pull the plug on that set up...

You can understand why I'd be skeptical of studios actions...

fitprod

bruceames

Disney is not a member of the UV consortium. They have their own program, with their own set rules, which are more restrictive and less secure than the UV program.

And yeah, dealing with Disney, I can understand your skepticism.

Sub-Zero

September 14:

Josh-da-man

Star Trek Into Darkness.

mattysemo247

Just wait until this week with IM3

Coral

BD has become a format for comic-book and Star Trek geeks.

hanshotfirst1138

Yup. Clearly the boycotting fans who cancelled their preorders didn't make any dent at all. As we knew they wouldn't.

Hardly, these are both big mass-market movies, not niche titles.

Alan Smithee

Stuff like that has always sold well on any format. Star Trek II was one of the first lower-priced VHS releases after all. Glad to see the early 'digital' release of Star Trek Into Darkness didn't hurt disc sales of it too much, which was probably what it was intended to do.

BuckNaked2k

It's true. Anything with one of the Avengers will sell like gangbusters, and skew the numbers mightily. Other than the big tent pole movies, Blu-ray remains the 25% solution.

Alan Smithee

Still better than laserdisc, which I've heard was the 2% solution! At the beginning of the HD formats, and in fact when I had first gotten into DVD, I figured that as long as these formats sold better than and had better support than laserdisc, they'd be OK. It would be really bad for Blu-Ray right now if you went into a store and found only DVDs of a new release but NO Blu-Ray copies- and that's just how it was for us laserdisc buyers in the VHS era!

JimRochester

They're pushing the envelope though with a rather high release week price. I was going to pick it up, then I saw the $25 price tag. I'll wait. There's no doubt it will be a huge seller but does anyone think the price will lower the numbers?