• by Wayne Friedman , January 7, 2011

Can't figure out where you left that DVD you just bought -- or perhaps rented? Here comes Ultraviolet.

Just when you thought there were plenty of ways to access TV and film content, Ultraviolet, a studio-backed initiative (but not Walt Disney, which is going in another direction) is a cloud-based system where consumers can "store" a particular purchase of, say, a movie where it -- in theory -- can't be lost.

Six studios are behind Ultraviolet -- Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a major panel featured a consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content System, which is behind Ultraviolet.

Representatives from Microsoft, NBC Universal, Samsung, Best Buy and Warner Bros. spoke. Two other major players in this arena were present, which panelists acknowledged, but hope to include at some later date. They were Apple and Disney, which is working on something similar to Ultraviolet called KeyChest.

Ultraviolet would give the consumers essentially "perpetual" rights to a piece of content, which would sit in a cloud-system. It would also allow consumers to more easily play content on a variety of screens -- TVs, computers, mobile, and gaming devices -- as well as the ability to share that content with a limited number of friends/ family.

One of the keys for consumers comes from the branding of Ultraviolet. Given many kinds of digital distribution points for content, a movie or TV show would have an Ultraviolet logo on a consumer's copy of that content. The goal is to reduce piracy.

Hollywood studios say Ultraviolet would lift sales of movies and TV shows, helping to improve the home entertainment market, which continues to see declines after five straight years. Total revenue from DVD, high-definition Blu-ray discs and digital sales and rentals of movies and television shows declined 3% to $18.8 billion in 2010.

The good news here was that losses narrowed from a nearly 8% decline in 2009.

Forty-six technology companies and retailers -- including Best Buy Co., Comcast Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Toshiba Corp. -- are backing Ultraviolet.