12 ms·

UltraViolet DRM will close on July 31, 2019

134 points by evanweaver 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I am pretty sad to see UV go because of the far more liberal policies it had regarding membership and sharing. UltraViolet supported a ton of smaller studios, television shows, etc. and their sharing system allowed you to share your library with up to five friends, who each had their own logins and ability to link all of their various retailers. MoviesAnywhere is far more restrictive. Only five major studios are participating, and smaller studios have actually so far been shut out. (STX has tried to get onto MA with no luck.) And obviously it doesn't yet support TV either. Their view on sharing is that you should use the sharing features of a retailer, but all of the retailers have the same, heavy-handed requirement for sharing: Apple, Google, and Amazon video library sharing requires sharing a single credit card for purchasing across linked accounts, which prevents their sharing methods from being used for casual/friend use. That being said, with studios gradually pulling out of UV anyways, the number of titles you could get new UV rights on was really diminishing anyways, and if each linked Vudu account is going to get permanent copies of our shared UV library when UV shuts down, it'll be good to have confidence that we aren't going to lose those titles.
- acomjean 8y ago
  I was having trouble figuring out what UltraViolet did (even after reading the faq).. They seem to a rights management for video but didn't store them? From there faq: UltraViolet is a free, cloud-based digital rights library for the movies and TV shows that you purchase or redeem at participating retailers. When you buy a movie or TV show that comes with an UltraViolet right from a retailer that you have linked to your UltraViolet Library, it's automatically added to your UltraViolet Library and you have options to stream it over the Internet and/or download it for offline viewing to a variety of devices.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    Movies would come with UltraViolet codes, which you would enter into the website, and then you would be able to watch the movies on linked retailers (mainly Vudu). It's largely been replaced by Movies Anywhere, which Disney spearheaded and has much larger participation than UltraViolet.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      Movies Anywhere also makes the basic idea a lot more trustworthy, because it's effectively a full cross-redeeming of licenses between a number of services rather than just a single service. To lose any of the purchases linked with it, every involved company would need to shutter their video services.
      - WorldMaker 8y ago
        "Keychest" was always the better tech. It's been fascinating to see it actually win out over the "worse is better" first mover advantage UV quickly staked out. It's also fascinating that for the most part there isn't any scorched earth from the consumer side of this war; several key retailers seem to have made it a mission that most users wouldn't even notice the transition of all their old UV keys to MA unlocks. Things have mostly just worked out.
    - jsgo 8y ago
      This is true, there’s also the aspect that if you bought a movie on Vudu and opened an account on Flixster or some other UV service, the UV compatible (all?) movies would show up there too (not just the code entered ones).
      - cwyers 8y ago
        Movies Anywhere does this for supported movies (which is not as many movies as I'd like it to be, to be sure). I can buy a movie on Vudu and watch it on Amazon Video or Microsoft's video stores (Windows/Xbox) or I think on iTunes, so long as I link my accounts. It's not quite the vision I have where platforms, not retailers, handle the front end and make it transparent to me what provider is giving me the movie (if I want to watch a movie, I shouldn't have to care if it's on Hulu or Netflix or whatever, I should just be able to pick it and watch it), but it's a step in the right direction.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
zozbot123 8y ago
A good start, but it's not enough. DRM schemes are designed to take away your fair and lawful rights as a participant in the media ecosystem. Every single one of them should be shut down.
- freedomben 8y ago
  I hate DRM and think it's a pernicious evil. I boycott DRM-ed media, with rare exceptions in cases where I can rip/re-encode and one vendor holds a monopoly. That said, while the impact of DRM is a huge reduction in personal freedom, I don't think it's accurate or fair to say: > DRM schemes are designed to take away your fair and lawful rights as a participant in the media ecosystem. They are designed to protect the copyright holder from infringement in the form of illegal sharing. They just don't care enough about the impact on users to counteract their desire to fight "piracy."
  - jupp0r 8y ago
    > They just don't care enough about the impact on users to counteract their desire to fight "piracy." Users rights are a subset of "piracy".
sneakernets 8y ago
And the Mouse Monopoly grows ever larger.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Disney did spin Movies Anywhere off into it's own company, and my understanding is that the five major studios more or less have equal authority over it. Of course, that five major studios is about to become four, and it does seem like they're gatekeeping out smaller players from participating at this juncture.
  - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
    > it does seem like they're gatekeeping out smaller players from participating at this juncture. Impending monopoly abuse lawsuit?
    - penagwin 8y ago
      But there's 5 (Soon 4) studios, that doesn't sound like a monopoly. Oligopoly and immoral sure, but I don't think most laws will help here.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        It could potentially be... I think a "trust" is the term? Basically, my understanding is that if you control the market by working with others, it still counts because you're still unfairly gaming the market by collectively leveraging your market share. Very much not a lawyer, so I might be mistaken.
babypuncher 8y ago
This is why I only buy disks and rip them. My Plex server will never close down or tell me I can't watch a movie anymore.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  While my eBook library is pretty something, the storage costs to rip my movie library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive. I do keep physical discs of the movies I really enjoy, and generally only buy digital during sales. Most of the "value" in my digital movie collection comes from digital copy redeems. Vudu does $5 sales all the time, and the way I see it, that's less than a movie ticket. So if I see it once, it was like going to see a movie, but with the theoretical hope of long-term persistence. The fact that MA insulates the risk of losing your titles across every major tech company adds to the comfort level now too, and as noted, nobody is losing their UV library when UV shuts down.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    DVDs are usually less than 5GB. 1TB drives cost $40 these days, less if amortized over larger disks. Which means $100 buys you enough disk space for two redundant copies of 200 movies assuming you vobcopy them; about twice or thrice if you convert to h264 or h265 or av1; and half again if you have BD quality rips. That’s about 50cents/movie for two copies, half if you only keep one. Is this really prohibitive?
    - olliej 8y ago
      I assume people with blue ray want to rip at original quality - isn’t that 10s of gig per disk? (I have never bought blue ray so have no idea). For me the problem was ripping my dvds just took so long, and wasn’t automatable (weirdly my bottom of the line Mac mini struggles with re-encoding ;) )
      - loeg 8y ago
        Yep, Blu-rays can store something like 25GB per layer; industry standard for movies is dual layer (50GB). Rips can achieve comparable quality with lower bitrate than used on the original disk. Blu-ray dates to 2006 and (typically) uses inefficient high bit-rate H.262 ("MPEG 2", which DVDs used), H.264 (AVC), or VC-1. Rips can use high-efficiency H.265 ("HEVC"). Typical for a 1080p H.265 encoding is 9-15 GB. (Lower for animated films.) UHD Blu-rays do use the more efficient H.265 already, but are much higher resolution as well. I'm not sure how prevalent they are.
Causality1 8y ago
Once again, having a massive personal archive drive (with backups) proves to be the better strategy.
- spacesuitman2 8y ago
  Don't remember to backup. I've had multiple drives fail (within 6 months!), luckily I always have at least 2 copies of my data.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  All purchased and UV-synced movies remain in users' accounts. The end of UV simply means they can't sync their purchases to other vendors.
  - pgrote 8y ago
    Odd. Under the "After the shutdown date:" section: "Your UltraViolet Library will automatically close and, in the majority of cases, your movies and TV shows will remain accessible at previously-linked retailers." I wonder what is a minority case?
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      We're referring to the same thing. By user, I don't mean a UV user, I mean a (for example) Vudu user.
jedberg 8y ago
I'm curious if anyone here thinks it would be morally or ethically wrong to download all the movies that you've already paid for via bittorrent? I can't think of a convincing argument against it, other than being technically illegal.
- rusk 8y ago
  You’re facilitating people downloading who don’t own the media? Just by virtue of how BT works.
- leeoniya 8y ago
  i dont see any issues with it (unless you're also seeding a lot) but my ISP might. i usually rent from a local library and use DVDFab & Handbrake/x264 to encode from scratch with excellent settings. Most of the stuff on torrent is lousy quality that's optimized for size first. The way I see it, i already pay huge property taxes that more than covers the few select movies i rip. sometimes i already own the DVD (720p) version but not the blu ray (1080p).
  - purple_ducks 8y ago
    > The way I see it, i already pay huge property taxes that more than covers the few select movies i rip. I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning.
    - leeoniya 8y ago
      > I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning. definitely some mental gymnastics are required. the difference between owning and renting is largely inconsequential. i rarely watch the stuff i own, and since i can rent it for free from a library, i would never buy it. i just save myself a library trip the one time in 2 years that i want to watch it. i guess i have little sympathy for ever-expanding media conglomerates, like Comcast-NBCUniversal, given how they've treated me as their loyal customer/prisoner for the past decade. i do pay for content from smaller studios, and as i said, most of the stuff i rip is older and i already own in crappier resolution on dvd.
shmerl 8y ago
Clear example why one should never to buy DRMed media.
niftich 8y ago
The term DRM usually evokes keyservers, but in that sense UltraViolet is meta-DRM, because it has no content-decrypting keyservers of its own. Instead, it's basically a big list of content you currently have rights for, designed solely for interop. You get these rights by using UV unlock codes, or pairing a "retailer service" which then imports its unlocked items into your UV one, and vice versa. The linked 'retailer service' is the one that has the actual content, and that service runs its own content-decrypting keyservers. With UV shutting down, the ongoing library interop between the UV partners will go away and further gains to any of those libraries will not be propagated to others. The concerns about DRM keyservers going away is a real one, but that's not what's happening (this time).
- evanweaver 8y ago
  This is correct, but then what happens when the UV partner closes up too? The whole point of UV was to de-risk committing to a specific streaming service because your purchases were portable, like being able to put a DVD you own in a different brand of DVD player.
  - niftich 8y ago
    Yeah, you're right. But in some sense that never materialized, because sometimes the place where UV synced your rights doesn't itself have rights from the studio to stream the movie [1]. It's a tangle of voluntary bilateral agreements among competitors whose gaps result in a landscape that's user-hostile, but UV rationalized some of it. Disney didn't join UV, and eventually pivoted their own digital locker storefront 'Movies Anywhere' into a US-only UV competitor that lured some studios and content sellers away. Since the news about UV is fresh, it remains to be seen whether the remaining studios migrate too, and whether the negotiations between the competing rights databases, the studios, and content sellers can result in a user-fair migration. As for non-US users -- shame on all players in this game -- they're always an afterthought to where piracy offers a superior UX, but other video platforms are proving this need not be the case. The DVD comparison is illustrative, and proves that decent UX with DRM can be achieved despite a dizzying array of rights, but the permissions are materialized into hardware and frozen in time. Online, the industry has been using malleable rights for both 'rent' and 'own' semantics, but for the latter case it's user-hostile. This is why more and more content platforms are missing the 'own' option entirely: you can stream whatever is available, but the selection may change at any time. For now, Vudu and FandangoNOW are two services that supports both UV and Movies Anywhere. If one pairs one these to both of UV and MA, the maximum amount of entitlements will sync across. [1] https://forum.vudu.com/forum/movie-and-tv-talk/movie-talk/61295- https://forum.vudu.com/forum/movie-and-tv-talk/movie-talk/61...
jcoffland 8y ago
DRM is crippleware which has always been a terrible idea. Let's ditch the focus on corporate profits and instead focus on making society better. Which is indirectly good for corporate profit anyway. Edit: I wish the Hacker in HN was real.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  Vast majority of people employed in the tech industry (think any major hardware or software company) are implicitly contributing to and benefiting from DRM. So I'm not too surprised with the general sentiment.
ihuman 8y ago
So in the future after Ultraviolet closes, I can redeem an UltraViolet code on one the listed retailers, and it'll still work?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Yes. The vast majority will redeem at Movies Anywhere or Vudu or both.
PretzelFisch 8y ago
Paid money to have digital access to these movies, and after the shut down all of the content may not be accessible. I would like to buy an digital file like I can for music.
pontifier 8y ago
Persistence of services like this, and true ownership of media you purchase are important concepts. VidAngel is currently in court fighting Disney over their version of a system I invented to solve these problems.

134 points by evanweaver 8y ago

I am pretty sad to see UV go because of the far more liberal policies it had regarding membership and sharing. UltraViolet supported a ton of smaller studios, television shows, etc. and their sharing system allowed you to share your library with up to five friends, who each had their own logins and ability to link all of their various retailers. MoviesAnywhere is far more restrictive. Only five major studios are participating, and smaller studios have actually so far been shut out. (STX has tried to get onto MA with no luck.) And obviously it doesn't yet support TV either. Their view on sharing is that you should use the sharing features of a retailer, but all of the retailers have the same, heavy-handed requirement for sharing: Apple, Google, and Amazon video library sharing requires sharing a single credit card for purchasing across linked accounts, which prevents their sharing methods from being used for casual/friend use. That being said, with studios gradually pulling out of UV anyways, the number of titles you could get new UV rights on was really diminishing anyways, and if each linked Vudu account is going to get permanent copies of our shared UV library when UV shuts down, it'll be good to have confidence that we aren't going to lose those titles.

acomjean 8y ago
I was having trouble figuring out what UltraViolet did (even after reading the faq).. They seem to a rights management for video but didn't store them? From there faq: UltraViolet is a free, cloud-based digital rights library for the movies and TV shows that you purchase or redeem at participating retailers. When you buy a movie or TV show that comes with an UltraViolet right from a retailer that you have linked to your UltraViolet Library, it's automatically added to your UltraViolet Library and you have options to stream it over the Internet and/or download it for offline viewing to a variety of devices.
- cwyers 8y ago
  Movies would come with UltraViolet codes, which you would enter into the website, and then you would be able to watch the movies on linked retailers (mainly Vudu). It's largely been replaced by Movies Anywhere, which Disney spearheaded and has much larger participation than UltraViolet.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Movies Anywhere also makes the basic idea a lot more trustworthy, because it's effectively a full cross-redeeming of licenses between a number of services rather than just a single service. To lose any of the purchases linked with it, every involved company would need to shutter their video services.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      "Keychest" was always the better tech. It's been fascinating to see it actually win out over the "worse is better" first mover advantage UV quickly staked out. It's also fascinating that for the most part there isn't any scorched earth from the consumer side of this war; several key retailers seem to have made it a mission that most users wouldn't even notice the transition of all their old UV keys to MA unlocks. Things have mostly just worked out.
  - jsgo 8y ago
    This is true, there’s also the aspect that if you bought a movie on Vudu and opened an account on Flixster or some other UV service, the UV compatible (all?) movies would show up there too (not just the code entered ones).
    - cwyers 8y ago
      Movies Anywhere does this for supported movies (which is not as many movies as I'd like it to be, to be sure). I can buy a movie on Vudu and watch it on Amazon Video or Microsoft's video stores (Windows/Xbox) or I think on iTunes, so long as I link my accounts. It's not quite the vision I have where platforms, not retailers, handle the front end and make it transparent to me what provider is giving me the movie (if I want to watch a movie, I shouldn't have to care if it's on Hulu or Netflix or whatever, I should just be able to pick it and watch it), but it's a step in the right direction.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

zozbot123 8y ago

A good start, but it's not enough. DRM schemes are designed to take away your fair and lawful rights as a participant in the media ecosystem. Every single one of them should be shut down.

freedomben 8y ago
I hate DRM and think it's a pernicious evil. I boycott DRM-ed media, with rare exceptions in cases where I can rip/re-encode and one vendor holds a monopoly. That said, while the impact of DRM is a huge reduction in personal freedom, I don't think it's accurate or fair to say: > DRM schemes are designed to take away your fair and lawful rights as a participant in the media ecosystem. They are designed to protect the copyright holder from infringement in the form of illegal sharing. They just don't care enough about the impact on users to counteract their desire to fight "piracy."
- jupp0r 8y ago
  > They just don't care enough about the impact on users to counteract their desire to fight "piracy." Users rights are a subset of "piracy".

sneakernets 8y ago

And the Mouse Monopoly grows ever larger.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Disney did spin Movies Anywhere off into it's own company, and my understanding is that the five major studios more or less have equal authority over it. Of course, that five major studios is about to become four, and it does seem like they're gatekeeping out smaller players from participating at this juncture.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  > it does seem like they're gatekeeping out smaller players from participating at this juncture. Impending monopoly abuse lawsuit?
  - penagwin 8y ago
    But there's 5 (Soon 4) studios, that doesn't sound like a monopoly. Oligopoly and immoral sure, but I don't think most laws will help here.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      It could potentially be... I think a "trust" is the term? Basically, my understanding is that if you control the market by working with others, it still counts because you're still unfairly gaming the market by collectively leveraging your market share. Very much not a lawyer, so I might be mistaken.

babypuncher 8y ago

This is why I only buy disks and rip them. My Plex server will never close down or tell me I can't watch a movie anymore.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
While my eBook library is pretty something, the storage costs to rip my movie library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive. I do keep physical discs of the movies I really enjoy, and generally only buy digital during sales. Most of the "value" in my digital movie collection comes from digital copy redeems. Vudu does $5 sales all the time, and the way I see it, that's less than a movie ticket. So if I see it once, it was like going to see a movie, but with the theoretical hope of long-term persistence. The fact that MA insulates the risk of losing your titles across every major tech company adds to the comfort level now too, and as noted, nobody is losing their UV library when UV shuts down.
- beagle3 8y ago
  DVDs are usually less than 5GB. 1TB drives cost $40 these days, less if amortized over larger disks. Which means $100 buys you enough disk space for two redundant copies of 200 movies assuming you vobcopy them; about twice or thrice if you convert to h264 or h265 or av1; and half again if you have BD quality rips. That’s about 50cents/movie for two copies, half if you only keep one. Is this really prohibitive?
  - olliej 8y ago
    I assume people with blue ray want to rip at original quality - isn’t that 10s of gig per disk? (I have never bought blue ray so have no idea). For me the problem was ripping my dvds just took so long, and wasn’t automatable (weirdly my bottom of the line Mac mini struggles with re-encoding ;) )
    - loeg 8y ago
      Yep, Blu-rays can store something like 25GB per layer; industry standard for movies is dual layer (50GB). Rips can achieve comparable quality with lower bitrate than used on the original disk. Blu-ray dates to 2006 and (typically) uses inefficient high bit-rate H.262 ("MPEG 2", which DVDs used), H.264 (AVC), or VC-1. Rips can use high-efficiency H.265 ("HEVC"). Typical for a 1080p H.265 encoding is 9-15 GB. (Lower for animated films.) UHD Blu-rays do use the more efficient H.265 already, but are much higher resolution as well. I'm not sure how prevalent they are.

Causality1 8y ago

Once again, having a massive personal archive drive (with backups) proves to be the better strategy.

spacesuitman2 8y ago
Don't remember to backup. I've had multiple drives fail (within 6 months!), luckily I always have at least 2 copies of my data.
gamblor956 8y ago
All purchased and UV-synced movies remain in users' accounts. The end of UV simply means they can't sync their purchases to other vendors.
- pgrote 8y ago
  Odd. Under the "After the shutdown date:" section: "Your UltraViolet Library will automatically close and, in the majority of cases, your movies and TV shows will remain accessible at previously-linked retailers." I wonder what is a minority case?
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    We're referring to the same thing. By user, I don't mean a UV user, I mean a (for example) Vudu user.

jedberg 8y ago

I'm curious if anyone here thinks it would be morally or ethically wrong to download all the movies that you've already paid for via bittorrent? I can't think of a convincing argument against it, other than being technically illegal.

rusk 8y ago
You’re facilitating people downloading who don’t own the media? Just by virtue of how BT works.
leeoniya 8y ago
i dont see any issues with it (unless you're also seeding a lot) but my ISP might. i usually rent from a local library and use DVDFab & Handbrake/x264 to encode from scratch with excellent settings. Most of the stuff on torrent is lousy quality that's optimized for size first. The way I see it, i already pay huge property taxes that more than covers the few select movies i rip. sometimes i already own the DVD (720p) version but not the blu ray (1080p).
- purple_ducks 8y ago
  > The way I see it, i already pay huge property taxes that more than covers the few select movies i rip. I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning.
  - leeoniya 8y ago
    > I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning. definitely some mental gymnastics are required. the difference between owning and renting is largely inconsequential. i rarely watch the stuff i own, and since i can rent it for free from a library, i would never buy it. i just save myself a library trip the one time in 2 years that i want to watch it. i guess i have little sympathy for ever-expanding media conglomerates, like Comcast-NBCUniversal, given how they've treated me as their loyal customer/prisoner for the past decade. i do pay for content from smaller studios, and as i said, most of the stuff i rip is older and i already own in crappier resolution on dvd.

shmerl 8y ago

Clear example why one should never to buy DRMed media.

niftich 8y ago

The term DRM usually evokes keyservers, but in that sense UltraViolet is meta-DRM, because it has no content-decrypting keyservers of its own. Instead, it's basically a big list of content you currently have rights for, designed solely for interop. You get these rights by using UV unlock codes, or pairing a "retailer service" which then imports its unlocked items into your UV one, and vice versa. The linked 'retailer service' is the one that has the actual content, and that service runs its own content-decrypting keyservers. With UV shutting down, the ongoing library interop between the UV partners will go away and further gains to any of those libraries will not be propagated to others. The concerns about DRM keyservers going away is a real one, but that's not what's happening (this time).

evanweaver 8y ago
This is correct, but then what happens when the UV partner closes up too? The whole point of UV was to de-risk committing to a specific streaming service because your purchases were portable, like being able to put a DVD you own in a different brand of DVD player.
- niftich 8y ago
  Yeah, you're right. But in some sense that never materialized, because sometimes the place where UV synced your rights doesn't itself have rights from the studio to stream the movie [1]. It's a tangle of voluntary bilateral agreements among competitors whose gaps result in a landscape that's user-hostile, but UV rationalized some of it. Disney didn't join UV, and eventually pivoted their own digital locker storefront 'Movies Anywhere' into a US-only UV competitor that lured some studios and content sellers away. Since the news about UV is fresh, it remains to be seen whether the remaining studios migrate too, and whether the negotiations between the competing rights databases, the studios, and content sellers can result in a user-fair migration. As for non-US users -- shame on all players in this game -- they're always an afterthought to where piracy offers a superior UX, but other video platforms are proving this need not be the case. The DVD comparison is illustrative, and proves that decent UX with DRM can be achieved despite a dizzying array of rights, but the permissions are materialized into hardware and frozen in time. Online, the industry has been using malleable rights for both 'rent' and 'own' semantics, but for the latter case it's user-hostile. This is why more and more content platforms are missing the 'own' option entirely: you can stream whatever is available, but the selection may change at any time. For now, Vudu and FandangoNOW are two services that supports both UV and Movies Anywhere. If one pairs one these to both of UV and MA, the maximum amount of entitlements will sync across. [1] https://forum.vudu.com/forum/movie-and-tv-talk/movie-talk/61295- https://forum.vudu.com/forum/movie-and-tv-talk/movie-talk/61...

jcoffland 8y ago

DRM is crippleware which has always been a terrible idea. Let's ditch the focus on corporate profits and instead focus on making society better. Which is indirectly good for corporate profit anyway. Edit: I wish the Hacker in HN was real.

bubblethink 8y ago
Vast majority of people employed in the tech industry (think any major hardware or software company) are implicitly contributing to and benefiting from DRM. So I'm not too surprised with the general sentiment.

ihuman 8y ago

So in the future after Ultraviolet closes, I can redeem an UltraViolet code on one the listed retailers, and it'll still work?

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Yes. The vast majority will redeem at Movies Anywhere or Vudu or both.

PretzelFisch 8y ago

Paid money to have digital access to these movies, and after the shut down all of the content may not be accessible. I would like to buy an digital file like I can for music.

pontifier 8y ago

Persistence of services like this, and true ownership of media you purchase are important concepts. VidAngel is currently in court fighting Disney over their version of a system I invented to solve these problems.