Saturday, July 24, 2010

UltraViolet ready to become the new omni-platform format for all devices to watch digital video.


In the works since 2008, Hollywood unveiled a name and logo this past Monday for what the entertainment industry hopes will become the new omni-platform, all-playing format to watch your video on almost any device – from TV's to cellphones and game consoles to Blu-ray, DVD players and computers. Its called UltraViolet.

UltraViolet – a collaborative industry effort to create an omni-platform digital video format debuted its new logo, UV, on Monday and it's website you can find RIGHT HERE. It plans to start beta testing UltraViolet in September as a standardized new system for downloaded video content and applications like buying movies and downloading them for instance. The consortium developing UltraViolet was basically inspired by the automated teller machine (ATM) as a way of how different businesses (banks) can interoperate by allowing people to use different devices but be able to get access to the same things irrespective of which one they use.

Technology companies like Microsoft (not Apple yet!), Hollywood's biggest studios like Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, (not Disney yet!) and electronic consumer product manufacturers like LG Electronics and Samsung (58 companies in total) are all working together to create UltraViolet, a new common file format that enables fire sharing and universal video playback for any bought (whether on physical DVD on through the internet as a digital file) and downloaded content on basically any device you have, named after the part of the light spectrum that's invisible – yet everywhere.

How UltraViolet will hopefully work in the future is that whether you buy a physical DVD or buy and download a movie it will come with a token key that indicated its yours. The UV logo will identify to consumers that things work together seamlessly and that digital content can be transfered and will play.

''Our goal is to firmly establish UltraViolet as the symbol for digital entertainment – one that gives consumers the freedom of access wherever they are, the confidence of knowing how it will work and the broadest choice of content, stores and devices,'' says Mitch Singer, president of the DECE consortium that's developing UltraViolet, in a press release.