Hollywood’s big plan to update the industry for the digital era – UltraViolet – comes to the UK on 26 December, the consortium behind it has revealed. It will be an inauspicious start, represented by just one new movie release, but there’s no mistaking the ambition of the project. Three years in the planning, UV is Hollywood’s attempt to get right what the music business has got woefully wrong, and it isn’t unreasonable to describe it as the biggest shift in thinking in the history of the movie industry.
Since the launch of VCR systems in the mid-1970s, consumers have merely bought a limited licence to watch a movie. New formats have been an excuse for Hollywood to get us to repurchase the content. But digital networks have made a nonsense of that notion, and enabled a huge new range of diverse devices and formats.