• by Wayne Friedman , October 12, 2011

UltraViolet -- a new home entertainment service -- starts Tuesday, looking to revive depressing DVD sales and rentals by allowing consumers to buy movie discs and their future digital rights, allowing access to content via cloud-like service for all consumer devices.

A couple of Warner Bros. titles will debut UltraViolet -- "Horrible Bosses," and later this week "Green Lantern," two recently released movies.

Consumers will need to purchase physical discs of movies in stores to access its future streaming/download rights via a cloud-like service. Warner Bros. is offering UltraViolet for three years. Consumers can access their "digital copies" of movies through the Warners’ owned site Flixster. Other studios will give consumers these rights for a year, and could tack on other fees after that.

The movie industry hopes that allowing consumers to store the movies they buy in a digital cloud and allowing them to stream or download the films to iPads, Androids, iPhones and other mobile devices, will convince people to buy rather than rent movies.

UltraViolet comes from an industry-backed consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem.

DVD sales have been in a bad state, losing some 44% in revenue recently versus the year before, according to one research analysis. Rentals are also down -- but not as much.

Other studios are looking to combat lower home entertainment business by testing "premium video on demand" releases, such as Universal Studios, charging $60 for its upcoming "Tower Heist" three weeks after its theatrical debut.

UltraViolet titles from Sony and Universal will debut in stores before the end of the year, with more movies from Paramount, Lionsgate and Fox expected in the first quarter of 2012.

Entertainment industry analyst Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research believes that UltraViolet may be too limiting for consumers who already have a variety of video platforms/services.

He writes: "While we are skeptical that anything can reinvigorate the purchase of home entertainment beyond drastically reducing prices points (relative to rental), forcing consumers to use your [the movie industry's] infrastructure versus the infrastructure they are comfortable with requires a “complete” solution, which the UV (UltraViolet)- ecosystem simply is not today."

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