Why I Care: Movies Anywhere

I'm going to start a new series for things I care about outside of the topics I already discuss on my blog, simply titled "Why I Care." In this first post, I want to take a look at announcement made yesterday that has the potential to change the entire way digital movie purchases work.

A couple years ago, Disney launched a service called Disney Movies Anywhere. It worked like Ultraviolet, the digital copy service, in a way: you entered codes online and it put it into your libraries in various retailers. Here was the difference, though: Disney partnered with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Vudu, making it far more cross-platform than Ultraviolet (it only had Vudu), as well as putting your movies in ALL of your connected libraries instead of just one. It was a nice little thing that I grew to love and wish others copied.

Well, yesterday something really big happened: Sony, Universal, Fox, and Warner Bros. all joined Disney's service and rebranded it as Movies Anywhere. Yeah, that's big. That's every major studio except Paramount and Lionsgate, and those two are reportedly talking with Disney about joining as well. All the studios participating that just joined used to use Ultraviolet as far as I'm aware, so this is a major shift in how digital movies work.

Why I care: I used to buy movies on Google Play, but because I couldn't download them to my laptop I began to reconstruct my library on Vudu with its far superior quality and desktop downloading. After linking my Vudu and Google Play libraries together through Movies Anywhere, about half of my Google Play purchases showed up in Vudu which means I can now watch them on my laptop offline if I'm on a long car ride or something like that. That news made my day. I loved Disney's service already, so the fact that all these other studios have joined the bandwagon is a dream for anybody buying tons of digital movies.

I wish Paramount and Lionsgate had joined, though, and as far as I can tell my MGM and Columbia films haven't been added either. This might not seem big, but it is: as of right now, the Mission:Impossible movies, James Bond, the Hunger Games franchise, and my collection of Tarantino films aren't shared across my libraries yet. That amounts to over twenty movies in my collection, and it doesn't include a ton of other standalones either. I hope that this unparalleled cooperation between studios continues and one of two things happens: the other studios get in on Movies Anywhere or Ultraviolet dies, which would force the former.

This is a revolution for the way digital movie purchases (and digital download code redemptions) work, and that's why I care. 

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