I am pretty sad to see UV go because of the far more liberal policies it had regarding membership and sharing. UltraViolet supported a ton of smaller studios, television shows, etc. and their sharing system allowed you to share your library with up to five friends, who each had their own logins and ability to link all of their various retailers.
MoviesAnywhere is far more restrictive. Only five major studios are participating, and smaller studios have actually so far been shut out. (STX has tried to get onto MA with no luck.) And obviously it doesn't yet support TV either. Their view on sharing is that you should use the sharing features of a retailer, but all of the retailers have the same, heavy-handed requirement for sharing: Apple, Google, and Amazon video library sharing requires sharing a single credit card for purchasing across linked accounts, which prevents their sharing methods from being used for casual/friend use.
That being said, with studios gradually pulling out of UV anyways, the number of titles you could get new UV rights on was really diminishing anyways, and if each linked Vudu account is going to get permanent copies of our shared UV library when UV shuts down, it'll be good to have confidence that we aren't going to lose those titles.
I was having trouble figuring out what UltraViolet did (even after reading the faq).. They seem to a rights management for video but didn't store them?
From there faq:
UltraViolet is a free, cloud-based digital rights library for the movies and TV shows that you purchase or redeem at participating retailers. When you buy a movie or TV show that comes with an UltraViolet right from a retailer that you have linked to your UltraViolet Library, it's automatically added to your UltraViolet Library and you have options to stream it over the Internet and/or download it for offline viewing to a variety of devices.
Movies would come with UltraViolet codes, which you would enter into the website, and then you would be able to watch the movies on linked retailers (mainly Vudu). It's largely been replaced by Movies Anywhere, which Disney spearheaded and has much larger participation than UltraViolet.
Movies Anywhere also makes the basic idea a lot more trustworthy, because it's effectively a full cross-redeeming of licenses between a number of services rather than just a single service. To lose any of the purchases linked with it, every involved company would need to shutter their video services.
"Keychest" was always the better tech. It's been fascinating to see it actually win out over the "worse is better" first mover advantage UV quickly staked out. It's also fascinating that for the most part there isn't any scorched earth from the consumer side of this war; several key retailers seem to have made it a mission that most users wouldn't even notice the transition of all their old UV keys to MA unlocks. Things have mostly just worked out.
This is true, there’s also the aspect that if you bought a movie on Vudu and opened an account on Flixster or some other UV service, the UV compatible (all?) movies would show up there too (not just the code entered ones).
Movies Anywhere does this for supported movies (which is not as many movies as I'd like it to be, to be sure). I can buy a movie on Vudu and watch it on Amazon Video or Microsoft's video stores (Windows/Xbox) or I think on iTunes, so long as I link my accounts. It's not quite the vision I have where platforms, not retailers, handle the front end and make it transparent to me what provider is giving me the movie (if I want to watch a movie, I shouldn't have to care if it's on Hulu or Netflix or whatever, I should just be able to pick it and watch it), but it's a step in the right direction.
MoviesAnywhere is far more restrictive. Only five major studios are participating, and smaller studios have actually so far been shut out. (STX has tried to get onto MA with no luck.) And obviously it doesn't yet support TV either. Their view on sharing is that you should use the sharing features of a retailer, but all of the retailers have the same, heavy-handed requirement for sharing: Apple, Google, and Amazon video library sharing requires sharing a single credit card for purchasing across linked accounts, which prevents their sharing methods from being used for casual/friend use.
That being said, with studios gradually pulling out of UV anyways, the number of titles you could get new UV rights on was really diminishing anyways, and if each linked Vudu account is going to get permanent copies of our shared UV library when UV shuts down, it'll be good to have confidence that we aren't going to lose those titles.