Time Warner to debut UltraViolet cloud movies
August 4, 2011
By Colin Mann
Time Warner has confirmed that it is to introduce UltraViolet, the technology that bridges a single piece of content to a variety of devices, to its home movies the coming autumn.
Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner’s chairman and chief executive, told analysts during a conference call that two movies, Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern, would be the launch films for UltraViolet, the pan-Hollywood initiative for allowing content to be stored in the cloud, then viewed on a variety of different devices.
Time Warner will be basing the initiative on the Flixster app, thus far primarily used as a site and app to catch up on movie news and watch trailers of upcoming films. “Beginning with the releases of Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern in the fourth quarter, the vast majority of our future home video new releases will be UV enabled,” Bewkes said. “The key part of our plan is to drive use of the UltraViolet is Flixster, the preferred system there.”
“Today, Flixster is one of the most popular applications for finding information about movies, and over the coming months we’ll begin to roll out new upgraded versions of the Flixster service, which will be deeply integrated with UltraViolet,” Bewkes added.
The new version of Flixter will enable consumers to watch and manage their digital collection, whether it is stored locally or in the cloud, Bewkes said. A beta will launch this week.
“We believe that this could fundamentally change how people manage and watch their movie collections and it could significantly improve the value proposition of digital ownership,” Bewkes said.
UltraViolet members include Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount, NBC Universal, Lionsgate, and Fox Entertainment.
“Remember, with UltraViolet, what will happen is, if you go and buy a physical DVD, you will have it in the cloud as you walk out of the store,” Bewkes said. “If you buy an electronic copy of a movie from either a cable operator or any electronic retailer, you’ll also own a copy that’s up in the cloud that you can move from device to device. If you want to take your old DVDs into retailers and have them put them into the cloud and therefore be available for you to move from device to device, you’d be able to do that also.”