Flixster has assured its UK users that their movies will transfer to a Google Play account, which at least offers some solidity: Google’s hardly likely to be going anywhere first, and it seems that in-date, unredeemed UltraViolet codes are defaulting to Google Play too.īut still, most people who use the Flixster service still don’t seem to know this, let alone how their account will be migrated (again).įlixster sent a mail out to its userbase in July, stating that “we have made arrangements with Google Play to enable you to migrate available videos in your Flixster Video collection to Google Play. Since all this became known, further information has been on the scant side. Flixster had already wound down its US operations, and then came the announcement that the UK side is closing too. The further problem though is that that company is Flixster. There was still one third party company supporting UltraViolet libraries in the UK, and films would still be accessible through there. But it meant that users had until July 31 st until their accounts and the service came to an end. This wasn’t a massive surprise, give that most studios had begun to withdraw support for it. In the UK, the service burned through a few of them, with companies such as HMV, Rakuten and TalkTalk at different stages supporting the service, and then backing out.Īt the start of the year, then, came the announcement that UltraViolet was to close. It was always something of a muddy scheme, though, as you then needed to link your UltraViolet account to a third party store, through which you’d access your digital movies. Many major studios (although not all) jumped aboard, with the likes of Universal, Warner Bros, Sony, Fox and Lionsgate all offering UltraViolet options with a purchase. Enter that code, and it was added to your UltraViolet account, giving you a digital version of a film as well as a physical one. That when you bought a DVD or Blu-ray, a film may contain a leaflet in it that in turn contained a code. UltraViolet, you may recall, launched around a decade ago, as the film industry’s attempt to head off digital piracy to some degree. Over the past few months, we’ve been seeing how that pans out with the closure of the UltraViolet digital movie locker service. Basically: what happens if said companies stop trading, or get out of the movie business? Internet goes down? It’s no problem if you actually have a DVD/Blu-ray/Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray/HD DVD/Laserdisc/VHS/Betamax of the film in question.īut there’s a further problem, and that’s over the companies offering you digital downloads of your movies. Granted, as much as the marketing campaigns pushing you to buy a movie to own were always a bit folly (even though we all bought discs, all that in the eyes of the law gave us was a license to watch the film in a non-commercial screening), there’s something tangible nonetheless about having a disc in your hand. Whilst more and more of the marketplace heads towards digital downloads over buying physical discs of movies, there remains a degree of worry over just where people’s rights lie if they don’t have a disc in your hand.
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