Hollywood Welcomes UltraViolet With Open Arms At CES 2011

With CES officially wrapped, it’s time to look back and see what the annual convention brought for us in the film world.

The biggest thing (save for a great and interesting Blu-Ray panel which you can see in full here), came in the form of digital distribution, and the new digital-content initiative, UltraViolet.

Complete with toasts made by executives from four major film studios, the convention played host to a true ‘coming out pary’, as a report at Paid Content describes it, for the brand, which was crafted by Sony Pictures CTO Mitch Singer, who is the head of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem.

The service, best described as a much broader reaching cloud system akin to Disney’s Keychest (there are 70+ companies within the DECE), offers a ‘locker’ where the system’s respective user may hold the rights to their TV and film purchases.   Think of it as a DVD collection that’s available anytime, anywhere.

Set to release sometime in the middle portion of 2011, a panel was held in support of the service, which appears to be quite a strong and strongly backed piece of technology by the biggest players in the world of film, sans Disney, and technology, sans Apple.

Personally, while I’m still a huge physical media fan, a cloud-based system for something like TV could be really interesting and intriguing.   I also wouldn’t mind being able to have the digital rights to DVDs that I buy, if that would be at all possible.   Something like a redeemable code on one of those Criterion postcards? Am I the only one who thinks that there may be something there?

What do you think?

Source: PaidContent