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Vidity Should Help Studios Stem Tide of Subscription Streaming

26 Aug, 2015 By: Thomas K. Arnold

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I hate buzz words and phrases such as “transformational moment” and “paradigm shift,” and yet I really hope everyone reading this recognizes the significance of the announcement by the Secure Content Storage Association (SCSA) that it has made available specs for “Vidity,” an enabling technology allowing consumers to move their 4K Ultra HD content easily around to virtually all their devices.

To use one of those phrases, this could be a real “game changer.”

The two biggest obstacles to buying movies and other content electronically, instead of on disc, is the lack of tangibility as well as the legitimate concern that your purchased content probably won’t play on all your devices.

Vidity smacks those two worries right out of the proverbial ballpark.

Much like a physical “combo pack,” you get everything with one single purchase — files for every device known to man, from your home theater system to your mobile phone.

And, again like a physical disc, you maintain possession of said files. They live with you, not on some far-off cloud, and you’re pretty much free to do with them what you want — move them around, take them with you to a friend’s house, transfer them to a new tablet when little Hunter cracks the glass and spills grape juice on your old one.

Vidity is also mercifully free of the other encumbering trappings so prevalent in the digital space, such as Internet access and the need to establish, and sign on to, myriad online accounts whenever you want to watch a movie.

I can’t stress how important this is to our industry, our business, our livelihood. If home entertainment is to survive, we need to establish a bulwark against subscription streaming with some sort of transactional business, which has always been the only real way for the home entertainment divisions of the studios to make money.

Under any sort of subscription business, content has no real value — which is a slap in the face to the creative community, and a blow to the pocketbooks of the studios. It’s merely part of a bundle, part of a package the consumer is buying for a very low price, sort of like those grab bags we all used to beg our parents to buy us when we were kids.

Netflix pioneered, and continues to dominate, the subscription streaming model. The concept behind Netflix is pure genius, playing right into the two key consumer “wants,” which is to get their entertainment as simply as possible, and as cheaply as possible.

Hollywood fed this monster, selling more and more old movies to Netflix to make their financial targets and compensate for slumping disc sales — only to find that the beast began taking a bigger and bigger bite out of Blu-ray Disc and DVD sales, to the point where consumer spending on disc purchases and subscription streaming is nearly equal.

Physical disc sales alone will never be able to reverse this trend, even if the advent of Ultra HD triggers resurgence in disc sales, as many of us believe it will.

Consumers are now in the habit of getting their movies and TV shows online, and anything we can do to turn them into buyers is welcome. Raising the comfort level, as Vidity promises to do, is certainly a step in the right direction.

And if all the studios come onboard and not only supply plenty of good, first-run content — of the kind not available on Netflix — but also aggressively market and promote this content, we might yet have a chance of saving this business.

 

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