UltraViolet Bows TV Spot on ESPN

14 Oct, 2011 By: Erik Gruenwedel

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Campaign to entice and educate consumers on digital storage and home entertainment launched Oct. 13 during USC-Cal college football telecast

Warner Home Video Oct. 13 bowed the first national TV spot for UltraViolet during the USC–Cal college football telecast on ESPN.

The 31-second , which focused on the Oct. 14 retail release of Green Lantern on Blu-ray Disc, gave a quick overview on how the movie could be stored in the cloud and accessed on myriad consumer electronics devices.

The ESPN commerical also featured a logo, which is not present on the embedded online version.

That the launch of a marketing campaign intended to inform consumers about UltraViolet bowed on ESPN — its owner, Walt Disney, has its own non-compatible cloud storage platform, dubbed Disney Studio All Access — isn’t as important as the fact that consumers of Green Lantern have to also register with Flixster.com to watch a digital file that is not compatible with any Apple device.

Richard Greenfield, analyst with BTIG Research in New York, said Warner’s launch of a cloud-based movie storage system at the same time Apple bowed its iCloud music storage platform will confuse consumers thinking the two are at least compatible.

“While we applauded the cross-industry alliance for launching UltraViolet, we were critical of the Warner Bros. decision to force consumers to use UltraViolet digital copy versus iTunes or Windows Media digital copy, given the infancy of the UV ecosystem,” Greenfield wrote in an Oct. 14 blog.

Greenfield said studios face alienating consumers with a digital storage system that he said is not ready for primetime — a complaint the analyst underscored by the non-availability of a UV-compliant file for sale online.

What Greenfield is ignoring is that UV (and All Access) is not being launched (initially anyway) to spur digital sellthrough as much as it is designed to reinvigorate packaged media sales.

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