News

The shutter of UltraViolet’s Cloud Movie Locker, shows the need to maintain a physical backup for your important digital content and movies

It was recently announced at the end of January that the once popular UltraViolet cloud movie locker will be shutting down for good in July. What does that mean for the more than 30 million users expecting content they paid for to be available to them on demand through this service, who collectively stored more than 300 million movies and TV shows in their cloud libraries? It puts them in a bind, even they are allowing customers to link their collection to another Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) service, it requires them to investigate which other cloud service they want to port their content over too and whether all their content will be available through the service they choose. Even though there are a number of other DECE providers, they all don’t have the access to the same licensed content. Therein lies a major problem, such as what if the alternative DECE service doesn’t have access to the same copyrights that UltraViolet does? That means a movie title you own through UltraViolet may not be offered on the service you switched to. What does that mean, do you lose that title? Even after you switch your library to another carrier, what if that company goes out of business too? Since everything is held in the cloud and you have no physical copies of your content, ultimately, there’s a risk you could lose your entire library of movies.
That’s why it’s important to always maintain a physical copy of any digital content you own. Optical discs stored properly, have an extremely long shelf life and are not susceptible to the potential pitfalls that cloud based digital content is, such as data corruption or deletion. In fact, to prove the vulnerability of relying solely on Cloud storage, just recently, the once popular MySpace social media site confirmed that they irretrievably lost all data content from years 2003 through 2012. This data loss wasn’t because of the company being hacked or a virus, but simply due to an accidental deletion during a data migration from one set of servers to another. That would never happen with optical discs. If you want to make sure your movie collection or any digital content will always be available to you, keep a backup on optical discs!