More examination of Ultra Violet - Paramount.
Paramount's implementation of Ultraviolet wasn't way to painful. At first I thought I was actually going to like it, I was able to log into the website, register my movie and overall it was rather painless. Then they pulled out the Silverlight trap. To Microsofts credit they re-directed me to Novell and their moonlight plugin, however the moonlight plugin was too old to work with my version of Linux, I don't know if they're updating it or not.
The workaround through Flixster that I found for Sony titles doesn't work with Paramount, they insist on streaming from their site.
I'm putting it ahead of Sony due to intent but at the bottom of the barrel due to usefulness.
There was a survey on their website and I responded with this:
Silverlight is a very bad choice. It is a proprietary Microsoft product, is full of security holes and is not open source friendly in the least. Replace Silverlight with something better, Java, Flash, an SSH tunnel SOMETHING but asking for web content and handing it to me through Silverlight is like asking for a drink and having someone hand you a soaked dish sponge.
Among the questions in the questionnaire they asked how important the Apple digital copy was to me. I responded not at all. This bothered me since they were so mono-culturally Apple in the question and didn't ask about the other options, such as Universal giving me the Amazon option and I think some of the other guys give Vudu and Netflix options, both useless to me for the time being but at least it's not Apple exclusively like Paramounts mindset.
On the whole Flixster seems to be the best thing going for Ultraviolet in general. It's mostly company neutral, they report on all movies equally. They are absolutely platform neutral, Flixster doesn't care what OS I visit with and they'll stream just about any movie for me the uvvu.com site will and then some. A shining example of making DRM work both for the consumer and the media companies. Following Flixsters model would "fix" both the piracy and availability issues for otherwise honest people while guaranteeing income for the media companies. This is why I foresee Flixster getting sued into crappifying their service eventually. Taking care of the consumer seems to be the thing many media companies hate the most.
The workaround through Flixster that I found for Sony titles doesn't work with Paramount, they insist on streaming from their site.
I'm putting it ahead of Sony due to intent but at the bottom of the barrel due to usefulness.
There was a survey on their website and I responded with this:
Silverlight is a very bad choice. It is a proprietary Microsoft product, is full of security holes and is not open source friendly in the least. Replace Silverlight with something better, Java, Flash, an SSH tunnel SOMETHING but asking for web content and handing it to me through Silverlight is like asking for a drink and having someone hand you a soaked dish sponge.
Among the questions in the questionnaire they asked how important the Apple digital copy was to me. I responded not at all. This bothered me since they were so mono-culturally Apple in the question and didn't ask about the other options, such as Universal giving me the Amazon option and I think some of the other guys give Vudu and Netflix options, both useless to me for the time being but at least it's not Apple exclusively like Paramounts mindset.
On the whole Flixster seems to be the best thing going for Ultraviolet in general. It's mostly company neutral, they report on all movies equally. They are absolutely platform neutral, Flixster doesn't care what OS I visit with and they'll stream just about any movie for me the uvvu.com site will and then some. A shining example of making DRM work both for the consumer and the media companies. Following Flixsters model would "fix" both the piracy and availability issues for otherwise honest people while guaranteeing income for the media companies. This is why I foresee Flixster getting sued into crappifying their service eventually. Taking care of the consumer seems to be the thing many media companies hate the most.