UltraViolet’s Common File Format to See ‘Initial Consumer Exposure’ This Year

The arrival of Common File Format (CFF)-based content and players later this year will facilitate video downloads via the UltraViolet licensing system, Mark Teitell, general manager of its member organization, the Digital Content Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), told Consumer Electronics Daily. Downloads are a major part of the UltraViolet vision going forward, said Teitell, saying UltraViolet wants to be viewed as more than a cloud-based system available through Vudu and CinemaNow. He referred to what UltraViolet sees as a “not very strong” electronic sell-through rate of current streaming services, including iTunes, which he attributed to multiple incompatible formats that prevent consumers from watching purchased content on multiple devices.

Consumers will be able to download content and then view it on 12 registered UltraViolet players, DECE says. An account can be shared by six people, it says. Current UltraViolet users -- DECE reports 13 million registered accounts, but won’t yet break out the number of active users -- are consuming UltraViolet-based content in roughly equal proportions of streaming and downloaded material, Teitell said. He said the number of licenses for owned, versus streamed, content is growing faster than the number of people joining the service, which the company attributes to a growing number of members that want to own content versus streaming it.

Overall, UltraViolet expects its members to use a combination of streaming and downloading depending on use case, Teitell said. For customers watching movies on TV via Vudu, CinemaNow and Flixster, for example, “they're most likely fine with streaming,” he said. Game console and PC users can download content using built-in storage, he said: “We believe consumers use both at different times.”

CFF “evolves” that scenario, Teitell said. Apps can be upgraded to be CFF-compatible for playback through Blu-ray players or set-top boxes from Roku and others that offer Vudu, CinemaNow and Flixster. But hardware can also be made CFF-compliant “out of the box,” he said. Incorporating digital rights management (DRM) directly into video processing is a “more effective and efficient” way to handle DRM, Teitell said. Computing devices with built-in storage -- including tablets and smartphones -- offer the “biggest use cases” for downloading movie and TV content versus streaming it, he said. Game consoles also have capability for storing downloads, he noted.

"Conceptually,” Teitell said, TVs could have that capability. While TVs typically don’t have built-in storage, Teitell said, future models could be CFF-enabled through external storage drives or USB ports. For example, users could copy licensed CFF files to a thumb drive through an enabled USB port and transport the file to another registered device, he said. Representatives for some of the big TV makers, such as LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Vizio, didn’t immediately comment about whether upcoming TVs would have CFF download capability via USB. At Sony, a spokesman said he couldn’t comment “about that specific capability but can confirm that many of our models have USB ports.”

Network-based storage will also be an option, where one device is the “repository” for the downloaded file, but the movie would then be available to networked TVs and other display devices in the home, Teitell said. High-end video server company Kaleidescape announced in April that its customers can purchase UltraViolet-enabled Blu-ray-quality movies via Flixster through the Kaleidescape Store.

Implementation of CFF is expected to have “initial consumer exposure” later this year, Teitell said. Testing of the format infrastructure has been going on for some time, he said. The system is being beta-tested by hundreds of “friends and family members” of employees of DECE member companies using “real implementations” of the major components of the ecosystem, he said. Until testing is complete, Teitell “can’t be 100-percent confident that that timing holds,” he said, but he expects “some companies” to offer CFF implementation to “some consumers” by year-end.

The big advance for UltraViolet users when CFF arrives is that they'll be able to have access to a movie across multiple devices via a single download, Teitell said. Today, UltraViolet users have to download a separate file, although they pay only once for a title, to each device they want to view it on. Teitell compared the CFF-enabled world with a Blu-ray or DVD. In other words, the license will be “like plastic” that users can play in any device licensed to carry the logo, provided it’s registered with the user’s account, he said. “They won’t need to rely on the Internet again for playback,” he said, which will save download time, and in some cases, money, if a user’s only access to the Internet is through a wireless data plan for a smartphone or tablet.

Teitell predicts that availability of CFF files that consumers can legally move around the house will create a market for media hubs that doesn’t exist today. Companies will want their apps, devices or services to be CFF-compatible to be part of the ecosystem, he said. He offered the idea of an enterprising retailer who gives members the option of how they want purchases handled. Users could check a box to have content always downloaded to two or three specific devices when they order a download, he said. “A lot of smart people are figuring out how to do these things,” he said.

As for whether, for example, a user could begin watching a movie on one device and pick it up on another -- as users can do with a cloud-stored Kindle e-book -- Teitell said the capability is there to do that in CFF. But UltraViolet hasn’t introduced the features to enable devices to report back to the cloud the time-stamp data showing where a viewer has stopped in a movie or TV show, he said. It’s not a technology issue, but an ecosystem rollout matter, where companies would choose to participate or not, he said. Any company that wanted to deploy that capability in its own devices right now -- say, Samsung or Sony with their tablets and TVs -- could do that, he said.

This time next year, Teitell said, consumers will see “a large portion” of all UltraViolet movies in CFF and they'll have access to multiple playback mechanisms. He expects the user base to be in the “20-something million,” he said. He extolled the performance features of the DTS and Dolby surround and HD resolution made possible by H.264 compression. Some users of higher-end products who have bought their gear for high-quality playback of audio and video may not even know they have the interoperability made possible by the CFF-based UltraViolet format, he said. As for 4K, “it’s of high interest” to DECE members, “but it’s a roadmap thing” that will take time for the industry to work through technical issues such as frame rates, dynamic range and color space, he said: “Our long-term intent is to have enhanced-quality versions of CFF beyond today.”