
UltraViolet DRM will close on July 31, 2019 - evanweaver
https://www.myuv.com/
======
niftich
The term DRM usually evokes keyservers, but in that sense UltraViolet is meta-
DRM, because it has no content-decrypting keyservers of its own. Instead, it's
basically a big list of content you currently have rights for, designed solely
for interop. You get these rights by using UV unlock codes, or pairing a
"retailer service" which then imports its unlocked items into your UV one, and
vice versa.

The linked 'retailer service' is the one that has the actual content, and that
service runs its own content-decrypting keyservers.

With UV shutting down, the ongoing library interop between the UV partners
will go away and further gains to any of those libraries will not be
propagated to others.

The concerns about DRM keyservers going away is a real one, but that's not
what's happening (this time).

~~~
evanweaver
This is correct, but then what happens when the UV partner closes up too?

The whole point of UV was to de-risk committing to a specific streaming
service because your purchases were portable, like being able to put a DVD you
own in a different brand of DVD player.

~~~
niftich
Yeah, you're right. But in some sense that never materialized, because
sometimes the place where UV synced your rights doesn't itself have rights
from the studio to stream the movie [1]. It's a tangle of voluntary bilateral
agreements among competitors whose gaps result in a landscape that's user-
hostile, but UV rationalized some of it. Disney didn't join UV, and eventually
pivoted their own digital locker storefront 'Movies Anywhere' into a US-only
UV competitor that lured some studios and content sellers away.

Since the news about UV is fresh, it remains to be seen whether the remaining
studios migrate too, and whether the negotiations between the competing rights
databases, the studios, and content sellers can result in a user-fair
migration. As for non-US users -- shame on all players in this game -- they're
always an afterthought to where piracy offers a superior UX, but other video
platforms are proving this need not be the case.

The DVD comparison is illustrative, and proves that decent UX with DRM can be
achieved despite a dizzying array of rights, but the permissions are
materialized into hardware and frozen in time. Online, the industry has been
using malleable rights for both 'rent' and 'own' semantics, but for the latter
case it's user-hostile. This is why more and more content platforms are
missing the 'own' option entirely: you can stream whatever is available, but
the selection may change at any time.

For now, Vudu and FandangoNOW are two services that supports both UV and
Movies Anywhere. If one pairs one these to both of UV and MA, the maximum
amount of entitlements will sync across.

[1] [https://forum.vudu.com/forum/movie-and-tv-talk/movie-
talk/61...](https://forum.vudu.com/forum/movie-and-tv-talk/movie-talk/61295-)

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babypuncher
This is why I only buy disks and rip them. My Plex server will never close
down or tell me I can't watch a movie anymore.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
While my eBook library is pretty something, the storage costs to rip my movie
library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive. I do keep physical discs
of the movies I really enjoy, and generally only buy digital during sales.
Most of the "value" in my digital movie collection comes from digital copy
redeems.

Vudu does $5 sales all the time, and the way I see it, that's less than a
movie ticket. So if I see it once, it was like going to see a movie, but with
the theoretical hope of long-term persistence. The fact that MA insulates the
risk of losing your titles across every major tech company adds to the comfort
level now too, and as noted, nobody is losing their UV library when UV shuts
down.

~~~
opencl
How many movies do you have? A 5TB hard drive is slightly over $100 and will
hold a minimum of 100 Blu-ray rips, assuming they use the entire disk capacity
and you don't reencode them to something smaller.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Well, for one, hard drives also fail. So I need backups, unless I want to have
to sit and re-rip everything when it happens. I'm a big fan of RAID 1 since I
don't have horrific rebuilds, and I offsite my data as well. (Most of my data
is stored on five hard drives currently.) So take your estimate drive costs
and start multiplying.

Second, my Vudu library contains over 600 movies and significantly more
television shows than that. And before you calculate the cost of the storage,
bear in mind there's another, secondary cost: The much higher cost I'd have
spent to have built that library solely on ripped discs. I never paid full
price for a digital purchase. (And specifically, never more than it would've
cost to acquire it via disc.)

Third, time. I'm also significantly backlogged in organizing my ebooks, which
I do store on drives. Blu-ray ripping time just isn't something I want to
dedicate a big chunk of my life to.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I totally feel your pain. I have been slowly building a local search engine
for navigating the ebooks, PDFs, and other documents I've got stored on my NAS
device.

I ended up replacing my NetApp StorVault (6TB (4TB usable), RAID6) with a
FreeNAS box from iXSystems (24TB (20TB usable), RAID6) which cost me a bit
more than $2500. (it is also much quieter than the StorVault was :-)). And on
that 20TB I've stored a bit more than 200 book volumes that I had digitized at
1DollarScan, probably close to 1000 magazines (scanned generally manually with
my ScanSnap 1500), and perhaps as many PDF documents that were never printed
to begin with (like data sheets). I also have my music collection, and I have
recently looked at putting movies on there as well since the streaming
services are letting me down here as well.

At the end of the day it is the 21st century version of one's personal
library.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Currently I can only really do metadata search, but I'd really love to set up
fulltext at some point. I have this dream where someday I can do things when
the Internet is down.

The other thing I'm interested in, and wonder if you have thoughts on: When
you pass, your personal library is inherited. Will people know what to do with
your digital library? Will it be useful? Will people want it?

~~~
ChuckMcM
My goal is exactly that, usability without me present :-).

The tools for processing PDFs into searchable text have a lot of warts. For a
while IBM was offering a free Watson service to do this (now its part of
Watson Discovery) which has some warts. I did manage a set of perl scripts
that would post process the statements that I downloaded from the bank into
CSV files, but I would still like to pull tabular data out of PDF book scans
to make the data they provide more useful.

I have a simple frontend based on the perl Mojolicious module which Blekko had
developed as part of another project but my indexing tools are still quite
primitive. Simple bi-gram and tri-grams, and a growing synonym index. I don't
give it enough queries to use my own traffic for ranking feedback. So
basically everything is nearly equal rank. Basically I am about to the
AltaVista level of search capability :-).

The vision is it just runs as a server and anyone on the same network can
access it like a web service an pull up documents (and in the future media) of
interest.

~~~
amaccuish
Did you get very far with other enterprise stuff like Sharepoint?

~~~
ChuckMcM
I didn't try Sharepoint, although I looked at Elastic Search on AWS briefly.
The goal though was to have all of this stuff on premises both for latency
reasons and to maintain a credible defense should someone come after me for
copyright infringement.

------
ocdtrekkie
I am pretty sad to see UV go because of the far more liberal policies it had
regarding membership and sharing. UltraViolet supported a ton of smaller
studios, television shows, etc. and their sharing system allowed you to share
your library with up to five friends, who each had their own logins and
ability to link all of their various retailers.

MoviesAnywhere is far more restrictive. Only five major studios are
participating, and smaller studios have actually so far been shut out. (STX
has tried to get onto MA with no luck.) And obviously it doesn't yet support
TV either. Their view on sharing is that you should use the sharing features
of a retailer, but all of the retailers have the same, heavy-handed
requirement for sharing: Apple, Google, and Amazon video library sharing
requires sharing a single credit card for purchasing across linked accounts,
which prevents their sharing methods from being used for casual/friend use.

That being said, with studios gradually pulling out of UV anyways, the number
of titles you could get new UV rights on was really diminishing anyways, and
if each linked Vudu account is going to get permanent copies of our shared UV
library when UV shuts down, it'll be good to have confidence that we aren't
going to lose those titles.

~~~
acomjean
I was having trouble figuring out what UltraViolet did (even after reading the
faq).. They seem to a rights management for video but didn't store them?

From there faq: UltraViolet is a free, cloud-based digital rights library for
the movies and TV shows that you purchase or redeem at participating
retailers. When you buy a movie or TV show that comes with an UltraViolet
right from a retailer that you have linked to your UltraViolet Library, it's
automatically added to your UltraViolet Library and you have options to stream
it over the Internet and/or download it for offline viewing to a variety of
devices.

~~~
cwyers
Movies would come with UltraViolet codes, which you would enter into the
website, and then you would be able to watch the movies on linked retailers
(mainly Vudu). It's largely been replaced by Movies Anywhere, which Disney
spearheaded and has much larger participation than UltraViolet.

~~~
crooked-v
Movies Anywhere also makes the basic idea a lot more trustworthy, because it's
effectively a full cross-redeeming of licenses between a number of services
rather than just a single service. To lose any of the purchases linked with
it, every involved company would need to shutter their video services.

~~~
WorldMaker
"Keychest" was always the better tech. It's been fascinating to see it
actually win out over the "worse is better" first mover advantage UV quickly
staked out. It's also fascinating that for the most part there isn't any
scorched earth from the consumer side of this war; several key retailers seem
to have made it a mission that most users wouldn't even notice the transition
of all their old UV keys to MA unlocks. Things have mostly just worked out.

------
Causality1
Once again, having a massive personal archive drive (with backups) proves to
be the better strategy.

~~~
gamblor956
All purchased and UV-synced movies remain in users' accounts. The end of UV
simply means they can't sync their purchases to other vendors.

~~~
pgrote
Odd. Under the "After the shutdown date:" section:

"Your UltraViolet Library will automatically close and, in the majority of
cases, your movies and TV shows will remain accessible at previously-linked
retailers."

I wonder what is a minority case?

~~~
gamblor956
We're referring to the same thing. By user, I don't mean a UV user, I mean a
(for example) Vudu user.

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jedberg
I'm curious if anyone here thinks it would be morally or ethically wrong to
download all the movies that you've already paid for via bittorrent? I can't
think of a convincing argument against it, other than being technically
illegal.

~~~
leeoniya
i dont see any issues with it (unless you're also seeding a lot) but my ISP
might.

i usually rent from a local library and use DVDFab & Handbrake/x264 to encode
from scratch with excellent settings. Most of the stuff on torrent is lousy
quality that's optimized for size first. The way I see it, i already pay huge
property taxes that more than covers the few select movies i rip. sometimes i
already own the DVD (720p) version but not the blu ray (1080p).

~~~
purple_ducks
> The way I see it, i already pay huge property taxes that more than covers
> the few select movies i rip.

I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning.

~~~
leeoniya
> I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning.

definitely some mental gymnastics are required. the difference between owning
and renting is largely inconsequential. i rarely watch the stuff i own, and
since i can rent it for free from a library, i would never buy it. i just save
myself a library trip the one time in 2 years that i want to watch it.

i guess i have little sympathy for ever-expanding media conglomerates, like
Comcast-NBCUniversal, given how they've treated me as their loyal
customer/prisoner for the past decade. i do pay for content from smaller
studios, and as i said, most of the stuff i rip is older and i already own in
crappier resolution on dvd.

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shmerl
Clear example why one should never to buy DRMed media.

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sneakernets
And the Mouse Monopoly grows ever larger.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Disney did spin Movies Anywhere off into it's own company, and my
understanding is that the five major studios more or less have equal authority
over it. Of course, that five major studios is about to become four, and it
does seem like they're gatekeeping out smaller players from participating at
this juncture.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
> it does seem like they're gatekeeping out smaller players from participating
> at this juncture.

Impending monopoly abuse lawsuit?

~~~
penagwin
But there's 5 (Soon 4) studios, that doesn't sound like a monopoly. Oligopoly
and immoral sure, but I don't think most laws will help here.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
It could potentially be... I think a "trust" is the term? Basically, my
understanding is that if you control the market by working with others, it
still counts because you're still unfairly gaming the market by collectively
leveraging your market share. Very much not a lawyer, so I might be mistaken.

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pontifier
Persistence of services like this, and true ownership of media you purchase
are important concepts.

VidAngel is currently in court fighting Disney over their version of a system
I invented to solve these problems.

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zozbot123
A good start, but it's not enough. DRM schemes are designed to take away your
fair and lawful rights as a participant in the media ecosystem. _Every_ single
one of them should be shut down.

~~~
freedomben
I _hate_ DRM and think it's a pernicious evil. I boycott DRM-ed media, with
rare exceptions in cases where I can rip/re-encode and one vendor holds a
monopoly.

That said, while the _impact_ of DRM is a huge reduction in personal freedom,
I don't think it's accurate or fair to say:

> _DRM schemes are designed to take away your fair and lawful rights as a
> participant in the media ecosystem._

They are designed to protect the copyright holder from infringement in the
form of illegal sharing. They just don't care enough about the impact on users
to counteract their desire to fight "piracy."

~~~
jupp0r
> They just don't care enough about the impact on users to counteract their
> desire to fight "piracy."

Users rights are a subset of "piracy".

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PretzelFisch
Paid money to have digital access to these movies, and after the shut down all
of the content may not be accessible. I would like to buy an digital file like
I can for music.

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ihuman
So in the future after Ultraviolet closes, I can redeem an UltraViolet code on
one the listed retailers, and it'll still work?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yes. The vast majority will redeem at Movies Anywhere or Vudu or both.

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jcoffland
DRM is crippleware which has always been a terrible idea. Let's ditch the
focus on corporate profits and instead focus on making society better. Which
is indirectly good for corporate profit anyway.

Edit: I wish the Hacker in HN was real.

~~~
bubblethink
Vast majority of people employed in the tech industry (think any major
hardware or software company) are implicitly contributing to and benefiting
from DRM. So I'm not too surprised with the general sentiment.

