Apple is streaming a concert special to iTunes users and Apple TV owners tonight, February 9, at 10:00  p.m. EST, 7:00 p.m. PST. The live content will appear on Apple TV under the brand iTunes Live in the Internet menu—an option that didn’t even exist on Apple TV just 24 hours ago. While some are questioning using Paul McCartney to premier such a feature, the choice aligns with Apple’s (an formerly Jobs’) affinity for all things Beatles.

Perhaps more importantly, this event demonstrates that Apple has the ability to deliver live video content and even introduce new programming options to the Apple TV on the fly, without a software update. Oh, the possibilities….

The Verge set the Windows Media Center community on fire this morning with their article titled “Media Center excluded from Windows 8 ‘Consumer Preview‘”. As one might expect, most people are pretty upset. Back in September Microsoft officially stated that Windows Media Center would definitely be included with Windows 8, but they didn’t really give any hints as to what changes might be coming for it. But if you were to look at Twitter today, you’d swear that the Verge’s article said that Media Center won’t be included at all. Apparently the reactions frustrated Microsoft too. They tweeted this morning, from their @BuildWindows8 account,

Good grief. We said “Media Center will definitely be part of Windows 8″…

They even included a screenshot of a Windows 8 PC, with build 8225, running Windows Media Center. The date and time on the clock in the screenshot clearly show that the image was taken this morning.

So what does all of this mean? Well, it definitely means that Windows Media Center will still be in Windows 8. Will it look or work much differently than the current version of Media Center in Windows 7? Well, this screen shot doesn’t look much different from Windows 7, but even that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Also, nothing has been said about whether there might be Metro-style apps that do all, or most, of the things that we use Windows Media Center for. At this point, we still need to just wait and see, unfortunately. Tune in tonight at 8pm Eastern as we discuss the issue more on Entertainment 2.0.

Click here to download this week’s episode!

Subscribe:
Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on Zune
Subscribe via RSS

Follow Matt at:

www.DoBlu.com

Twitter: @DoBlu

Also Follow The Movie Podcast on:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TheMoviePodcast

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheMoviePodcast

Intro & Outro Music by: Genre

This weekend the world was introduced to the “Hulubritory” where Will Arnette is conceiving new ways of liquefying the public’s brains for easy consumption. One of those new tools for brain liquefication is Hulu’s most recent attempt at original content creation called Paul the Male MatchMaker. This comedy from Warner Bros. Studio 2.0 pans on the public’s love for the adult dating genre.

This mockumentary-style sitcom showcases Paul, a neurotic socialite who decides to take a stab at running his inherited matchmaking service. Hilarity ensues when his direct, brutally honest approach is not well received by his clients and guest stars, including Janeane Garofalo (The Larry Sanders Show), Lisa Edelstein (House M.D.), Tony Hale (Arrested Development), David Eigenberg (Sex and the City), Jean Louisa Kelly (Yes, Dear), and Sam Trammell (True Blood).

Hulu is not the only streaming service bringing its own self-generated programming to the web. Today, Netflix released its first eight episodes of Lilyhammer for streaming users only. The series stars Steven Van Zandt (Sopranos) as a former New York City mobster restarting his life in Norway. Netflix was not the first though. You may recall Hulu attempted this last March with the drama The Confession staring Kiefer Sutherland and John Hurt.

Starting Monday, Feb 13, Liz Tuccillo (He’s Just Not That Into You, Sex and the City) and Paul Bartholomew (Mad Men) will bring 10 episodes to Hulu as the sole delivery of content. The new show will only be available to paying subscribers of Hulu PLUS. Check out Paul the Male MatchMaker next Monday, and let us know what you thought in the comments section below.

This week the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) released a regulatory filing to the FCC detailing the deployment of CableCARD to consumer devices from the top five cable companies. Details were included from Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable, although the report provided summary data of the top 10 companies. According to the report “over 554,000 CableCARDs deployed for use in retail devices by the ten largest incumbent cable operators.” Of course the NCTA, who has fought against the CableCARD rules from their initial drafting, was very quick to point out that since the CableCARD rules have gone into effect those same ten companies have “deployed more than 32,000,000 operator-supplied set-top boxes with CableCARDs.”

Fortunately, not everything written in the document’s 13 pages was pure rhetoric. There was also a lot of interesting data about how many CableCARDs have been deployed, how many of them were installed by technicians vs. the customers doing self installs, and how many truck rolls (service calls resulting in a technician being sent to the customer’s house) were required in the first 30 days to get a CableCARD deployment operational.

Comcast is the largest cable company in the country, so it makes sense that they would have the most consumer CableCARD systems deployed. Of the companies that reported the self install rate, Comcast fits right in the middle. The number they reported, 29%, is about what I would have expected. It’s not a tiny number, but it’s sufficiently large given that a consumer who did enough research to decide to buy/build their own set-top-box or home theater PC, is probably also reasonably comfortable installing their own gadgets too. The number of truck rolls required also points out some interesting data. Cablevision customers and technicians appear to be doing the best job of getting things working on the first effort where Charter obviously has some work to do! The other interesting piece of data here is Cablevision’s self install percentage. Did 57% of their CableCARD customers really do their own installations? If so, then our respect goes out to those 22,000 customers who, not only installed on their own, where pretty successful at getting it all working.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in this chart is that it’s supposed to show data per quarter, but it only has data for quarters two and four. Unfortunately, the NCTA isn’t very consistent with their FCC filings. In fact, Q4 isn’t even technically accurate as the data actually covers September through December of 2011. Putting all that aside, the numbers themselves are interesting. In four of the top five companies CableCARD subscribers grew. In two cases, Cablevision and Cox, the growth was even at a pretty significant percentage. Comcast, on the other hand, dropped more than 36,000 CableCARD subscribers. We don’t have Comcast’s fourth quarter subscriber numbers yet, because they aren’t releasing those details until February 15th. Since we don’t know if Comcast lost video customers for the quarter, the only other assumption that we could make is that many of these CableCARD customers switched to Comcast’s newer Xfinity DVRs.

The last chart just shows the number of CableCARDs deployed as a percentage of the company’s total subscribers. Even given the large percent of Comcast customers who switched from using CableCARD in a consumer device, they are still out in front. If Cablevision continues the rate of growth from Q4 into 2012 they will very quickly overtake Comcast.

So despite the cable industry’s ongoing assault against CableCARD, in favor of their own locked-down boxes, I think it’s safe to say that CableCARD is doing well. While we know that home-built home theater PCs don’t make up the majority of these CableCARD installs, we certainly hope to see more people building Windows 7 Media Center boxes equipped with any one of the many CableCARD tuners currently available. We’re also excited to see Ceton going up against Tivo directly with their Q Entertainment Platform.

Souce: NCTA

Click here to download episode #164

Subscribe to the Show

• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via Zune
• Subscribe via iTunes

Show Links:

Be sure and send us your emails and voicemail! (1-877-856-4933)

Follow us on Twitter: Josh Pollard, and Richard Gunther.

Like us on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/theDMZ

Check us out on Google+

Feedback? You can call us at 1-877-856-4933 or visit our Facebook page.

Here’s the rundown of this week’s show:

August 20, 2009. Since that time, we’ve recorded 100 episodes of our little podcast. Couldn’t have done it without all of you that listen. For this show, we welcome back original co-host Adam Thursby and the three of us spend some time looking back on nearly three years of HD-related news and information, including some humorous news stories from the early days, and a general amazement that the first Blu-ray we reviewed was “Ghost Town”.

We wrap the extended show with our look at the best in Blu from 2011. Check out the full list (save a few additions from Phil/Adam) at Doblu.com.

Finally, in celebration of the century mark, we have a pair of Blu-ray packs to give away. The first features a handful of IMAX 3D discs including Arabia, Mummies Secrets of the Pharaoh, Zach’s Flying Adventure, The Ultimate Wave Tahiti, and Kenny Chesney’s 3D concert. The second pack includes Supercop, Greece: Secrets of the Past, Catch .44, Tanner Hall, and Dirty Girl (DVD). Now before you go wondering why an HD show would give away a DVD, you should know this particular DVD includes a refrigerator magnet. Yes, we’re serious.

How do you win? Pretty simple.

1. Follow @doblu and @digimediazone on Twitter.

2. Tweet the following link: I want Blu-rays from @doblu and @digimediazone. #SeeninHD100 Prize packs and rules at: http://ow.ly/8QeX7

The contest is open from Feb. 2 until Feb. 16. One tweet is all you need to enter the contest for both prize packs. One prize per person. Must be a US resident to win.

Blu-ray releases for February 7.

Click here to download Episode 100!

	Seen In HD Subscriptions

What you will need:

• WHS 2011
• Separate storage drives in the WHS2011
• Windows 7 running Windows Media Center

I will assume that you have already set up your WHS2011. So the first step is to open the WHS2011 Dashboard and go to the Server Folders and Hard Drives section. By default, WHS assigns default locations to where it thinks you want to store your files. We do not want to go this route. Instead, we want to choose a specific folder. So go ahead and select the Recorded TV folder, and take note of its location. If it is not where you want to store your files then simply press “Move the Folder” button.

If you do this you will now see a list of possible locations that you can move the folder to. So go ahead and pick a different hard drive to put your Recorded TV on to. Another thing we will want to do is Turn off Shadow Copies for this hard drive. If you desire you can keep Shadow copies on, but it’s not necessary since you are probably already running a RAID. Next, click on “Hard Drives” and select the hard drive that the Recorded TV folder is now on and click “View Properties”. Now under the “Shadow Copies” tab uncheck the “Enable Shadow Copies” box to disable it.

We are all done on the Home Server. Now if you haven’t installed the WHS connector software on your HTPC you will want to do that now. To do so simply go to a web browser on your HTPC and enter http://<servername>/connect and install the software. After you have done this you will want to open up WMC. Right under “Extras” you will now see a nice new tab called “Home Server”. Unlike WHS v1 there is only 1 option here, which is TV Archive.

Once you select this, you have 4 options.

• Series –> Select specific series that you want to have copied to your WHS
• Programs –> Select specific recordings that you want to have copied to your WHS.
• Settings –> There is only 1 option which is to automatically back up everything to your WHS.
• Activity –> View if files have been copied over to your WHS

So for instance I can tell my WMC to backup this episode of 30 Rock by checking it and hitting save.

After I hit save I can now go into activity and see that is is being archived directly to my WHS:

If I simply open up WHS in windows explorer I can see that it is currently being copied over as well.

So there you have it. The important part is to specify on your WHS where you want your Recorded TV to pull from. Your archived shows should still show up in your Recorded TV folder. If they do not simply go to Settings->Media Libraries->Recorded TV->Add Folder->On another computer –>Select WHS –> Select Recorded TV Folder and you should be go to go.

If you are interested in purchasing Windows Home Server 2011, it is available on Amazon for as little as $45!

We are sorry we have been away for a week and also 1 day late, but do not fear we are back with some great reviews. We have The Ides of March with Clooney and Gosling. Also a little Hugh Jackman in Real Steel aka the rockem sockem movie. Then also a little JGL in 50/50. We also touch up on a few other movies including Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and also Underworld Awakening.

Click here to download this week’s episode!

Subscribe:
Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on Zune
Subscribe via RSS

Also Follow The Movie Podcast on:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TheMoviePodcast

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheMoviePodcast

Intro & Outro Music by: Genre

From looking at the UltraViolet flyer it sounds great: I can watch my movie any time on computers, tablets, and even smartphone, because it is on select devices. I guess you can also share your collection with up to 6 family members. I am not sure that works because can’t you just give your username and password to everyone? (we will find out). From the flyer it is also apparently extremely easy with only three steps. 1 – go to a website (http://www.sonypictures.com/uv/drive) …Also the worst URL ever. 2 – Enter code. 3 – Create some accounts and watch my movie! If that is it then I am surprised, and that sounds like it should take about two minutes, so let’s find out.

Step 1 – “From your computer, go to www.sonypictures.com/uv/drive

This seems really simple, so I opened up Chrome and boom all I have to do is enter my code? But Ryan seems skeptical.

Step 2 – “Enter the Redemption Code below”

Alright I think I can handle this.

So I enter it and simply hit “REDEEM”…uh oh LIES! I can not simply go to step 3! I have to tell Sony where I bought the Blu-ray. This also seems easy so I input the only place you should buy Blu-rays, Amazon.com.

Step 3 – “Follow the steps to create or log in to your free UltraViolet and Sony Pictures movie accounts to start enjoying your movie”

Alright so that one wasn’t on the flyer, but this one was. I now have to create some accounts. According to the flyer I have to create two accounts which seems very odd, but let’s roll with it.

So after filling in:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Birth Day
• Zip Code
• Email Address
• If I have an UltraViolet Account??? (Aren’t I signing up for one?)
• Then I have to sign up for a Sony Pictures account… and an UltraViolet account.
• ….WAIT???!?!? HUH??? alright I am in
• Also I need to agree to about five different privacy policies and terms of use.

Alright so I have all this jazz filled out so now I can watch my movie right? Nope, I need to agree to another terms of use:

Alright I agree without reading it just like everyone else, so now I can watch it right? According to the next page I can, so says Ryan Gosling:

To my surprise I get a nice Silverlight video player with my movie. It even has chapter support:

So overall that didn’t seem too complicated to get it going, but the real question now is do I need both of these accounts to watch this online? Also what about mobile devices? Well according to this big purple bar on top of the page my account is not activated at UltraViolet, so let’s do this now. There is a direct link so that should be simple. The link does nothing more than take me to www.uvvu.com where I need to sign in. Enter my credentials and I am in, but only after I fill in a second secret question. I am not sure why Sony didn’t ask me to fill it out, but that seems alright. They send me an email and I have to go validate it. So I open up my Gmail where in fact an email had been sent and my account is now activated.

It appears as though any movie I redeem will be accessible over at uvvu.com, however if I actually want to stream Drive then I have to go to the Sony website.  The odd thing here is that it does NOT ask for my UltraViolet account. It actually asks for my email and password for my Sony account. Once I log back in now I can watch Drive once again. While this doesn’t seem like a huge issue, there are a lot of different movie distributers out there and if you have to have a separate account for each that is just going to be a pain in the butt.

Alright back to mobile phones though. I head back over to uvvu.com to see what I can play this content on. I click on the big “Our Apps and Devices” button in hopes my brand new Galaxy Nexus can play this content back. NOPE! Apparently there are NO devices that UltraViolet works on. This is actually a let down and basically a lie according to the flyer.

While there is no list, I remember someone saying that Flixster had UltraViolet. After digging through their website I found www.flixster.com/ultraviolet with a nice video. So I better sign up for an account so I can stream it to my Android Flixster app. After quickly signing up on Flixster.com I think I am good to go.  I press on the redeem option and it is time to link my UV account with Flixster. I also apparently need to give Warner Bros. the rights to access my UV account. These seems fine, so let’s do this. After linking my account I have to enter the UltraViolet code once more:

However apparently my code is now invalid

Do not fear though, apparently since I already activated it with Sony it is now just in my “Flixster” collection. So it is on uvvu.com, sony.com, and flixster.com. That is not confusing at all. The interesting thing is if I just simply press play on flixster.com it does NOT redirect to sony.com, but instead it just starts playing. This seems great. However just like everything else in this process it is not that easy. When I was streaming Drive at Sony.com I was able to get SD and HD streams, however on Flixster.com I only receive SD, and it is also Flash.

So now it is time to see if it starts streaming on my Android phone, which is the only reason I signed up for the Flixster account. After downloading the official flixster application on the Android Marketplace and signing in and checking my collection I have the option to stream or to download.

So this was a journey into UltraViolet. At the end of the day, UltraViolet does seem to work. It is not uniform, requires multiple accounts, and seems to not have enough information, but after a while you can stream a movie. It just seems like too much work for the avid consumer, which I believe is the real problem. How was your UltraViolet experience? We want to know! Leave comments below.

Update 1: I have also tested the Flixster app on the Kindle Fire and it streamed Drive just fine.

Additionally Drive is now available on Blu-ray:

We’re looking to grow The Digital Media Zone this year, and to do that we’ll need more talented writers. Do you have a passion for technology? Are you always tweaking a home theater PC, or trying to find new ways to integrate your Apple devices with Windows PCs? Maybe you’re an audiophile who loves to check out the latest speakers, receivers, and HD displays. The DMZ is not just a news site; we’re much more than that. We don’t just crank out short news posts, we’re here to offer more insight into using technology and digital media to make your life awesome. If you’d like to join our team then shoot us an email through the contact form. Let us know a little about yourself and what drives your passion for digital media technology!

CES ice sculpture greets the press at CES Unveiled

With CES now two weeks behind us, I find I’m still filing product information, organizing photos, posting stories, and following up with vendors. This year’s show was one of the more interesting for me…and certainly one of my busiest. Before we put the lid on CES (at least until the new product review units start coming in), I wanted to talk a little bit about the whole thing—to reflect on my experience and share some thoughts about CES and its importance to companies and consumers alike. I also have some final videos and pictures to share.

This was my seventh CES. I clearly remember how overwhelmed I was the first time I went six years ago: a taxi queue that wrapped back and forth over the length of the airport five times; obscenely expensive, often shabby accommodations; multiple venues; thousands and thousands of people; and…Vegas! It’s almost too much for the mind to comprehend. Overwhelming is the one word I consistently use to describe CES.

Bigger is better, and that theme seems to be reinforced by the exhibitor’s press spectacles and enormous booths. Actually, “booth” is technically the wrong word in many cases. I posted a video to our YouTube channel that walks through Microsoft’s space on the floor. It takes 3½ minutes to circle through once without stopping to look at anything.

Then, of course, there are the monstrous video displays and presentations. Exhibitors build these massive, multi-screen theaters to demonstrate and promote their new technologies. They play high-budget, masterfully-produced segments that are designed to entice you in, engage your senses, and push your emotional buttons. It works. This video on our YouTube channel captures clips from just three of these presentations from Microsoft, Samsung, and LG. Just look at how happy these devices make people. Walking the expo floor is like walking from one reality distortion field to the next.

The highlights for me? My favorite product: Ceton’s preview of a multi-room entertainment platform that Windows Media Center users should feel right at home with. My least favorite: Logitech’s Cube that isn’t really cubic and purports to revolutionize the mouse (one word: ergonomics). My favorite product that has nothing to do with home media: The Windoro robotic window washer.

As the show came to a close, I joined a small group of onlookers watching Gary Shapiro, at Engadget’s interview stage, as he broke the news that this was their biggest show ever with over 153 thousand attendees. Two things struck me there.

First…WOW. As our economy continues to struggle, the technology sector bucks trends and pushes forward…often times growing despite lower disposable income. The expo floor is a whole lot of ground to cover, and most attendees likely only see a small fraction of the exhibitors. Indeed, with appointments and events taking up most of my calendar, I’m lucky if I can say that I was able to stop and look at even 100 of these exhibitor’s wares. Rather than write about everything that interested me, I’ve shared a gallery of captioned photos that should give you an idea of what I found most interesting. And of course, we’ve all been writing and talking about the things we’ve found most newsworthy at this year’s show.

But perhaps more importantly, it wasn’t big media that first heard and shared Shapiro’s news—the big four networks and major publishing outlets were nowhere to be found when Shapiro shared the attendance numbers. Instead, he broke the news with Engadget—once a scrappy little tech blog that’s now considered a leading source for technology and consumer electronics news. In fact, my live tweet probably hit your feeds before big media even knew about it.

I can’t stress enough how big a change this is and how important it is. We know the face of media is changing, and we see big media losing ground to blogs and other Internet resources. There are more outlets than ever for consumers to learn about news and technology, and fundamental shifts like this reinforce why we do what we do here at The Digital Media Zone.

I’ll wrap with this thought: People continue to ask, “does the Consumer Electronics Show still matter?” Half of the things we see at CES never make it to homes or store shelves. And with Microsoft leaving CES, companies crafting their own media buzz, and the Internet offering companies immediate promotion and communication channels, do we still need CES? Do they?

I say yes. I’d throw some expletives in there if I wouldn’t have to edit them out later. CES is a connections venue—it affords vendors, manufacturers, distributors, and resellers an opportunity to meet efficiently and in a controlled environment. And it gives the press an opportunity to learn and inform consumers about technology trends and promises. People meet and talk. They engage and establish relationships. Businesses gain exposure, deals get made, partnerships form, and consumers learn. How is this not good? How is this not important? Yes, CES is still relevant and necessary. Perhaps now that we’ve become so used to virtual, asynchronous communication, it’s even more important to actually meet people and see things in person.

MoCA, or Multimedia over Coax, is a technology designed to support the growing networking needs of today’s connected homes, recognizing that many houses don’t have the networking infrastructure needed to connect the latest entertainment devices.

The idea behind MoCA is simple: while most houses today don’t have wired network connections in every room, many have Coax infrastructure that reaches most living spaces. MoCA technology uses that Coax infrastructure by piggy-backing network traffic on those wires without impacting the video signals they already carry.

Today’s MoCA carries network signals at about 175 Mbps with nominal signal loss, making it a better solution for home and Internet video streaming than, say, wireless. Plus, it can be set up to complement your existing network—wired or wireless.

Why you may not have heard about it is that consumers with MoCA in their homes don’t need to worry about it; in fact most don’t even know about it. Some cable and satellite providers rely on MoCA when setting up multi-room DVR and entertainment systems in a home. In many cases, the MoCA technology is built right into the boxes installed by your provider.

That’s starting to change with consumer-oriented MoCA bridges and routers starting to make their way into retailers. Devices like Channel Master’s Coax Adapter let consumers extend their wired networks into bedrooms, dens, and kitchens—locations often inaccessible by wired Ethernet.

MoCA is powered by a chipset created by Entropic Communications. At CES this year, Entropic’s booth showcased a large array of products that currently support or depend upon MoCA for connectivity. As one of the co-founders of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (also, confusingly, abbreviated MoCA), Entropic continues to improve and expand upon MoCA’s impact in the home. Showcasing MoCA 2.0 at CES, they demonstrated next-generation MoCA networks pushing 400 Mbps over 16 nodes with a mode that supports up to 1Gbps performance under certain conditions.

MoCA’s future certainly seems bright at this point. Every provider of multi-room video solutions we spoke with at CES—TiVo, DISH Network, Arris, Ceton—is building MoCA into their solutions or testing with MoCA adapters. And with MoCA 2.0 rolling out to homes and consumer devices, wireless video stuttering and re-buffering could become a thing of the past.

Click here to download episode #163

Subscribe to the Show

• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via Zune
• Subscribe via iTunes

Show Links:

Be sure and send us your emails and voicemail! (1-877-856-4933)

Follow us on Twitter: Josh Pollard, and Richard Gunther.

Like us on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/theDMZ

Check us out on Google+

UltraViolet à la Paramount

Let’s start with Paramount’s UltraViolet offering, in general. You may want to seriously consider those iTunes and Windows Media options, because Paramount’s flavor of UltraViolet doesn’t seem fully baked yet. You need to sign up for yet another account (just like at UVVU, Flixster, Sony, and Universal), so we’re up to five accounts now with only four of the majors in the pool. Once you’ve registered, linked, and logged in, you can redeem, view, and download your Paramount titles.

Paramount's proprietary download manager doubles as the only playback mechanism for their UltraViolet titles

You’ll need to install yet another retailer-specific program to download and play Paramount’s UltraViolet titles offline on your PC or Mac. That’s about where the similarities end.

Like the other studios, Paramount’s site is designed to show you not just their titles, but all of the titles in your UltraViolet locker. At release time and as of this writing, this feature doesn’t work properly. We reported the issue to Paramount’s UltraViolet help desk and promptly received a message from Zukor LLC explaining that “you will only be able to see your Paramount Ultra Violet digital copies.” Actually…not true. The page is there—it’s intended to show the other titles; Paramount’s FAQs clearly state that “you will be able to see your entire UltraViolet library;” oh…and UltraViolet is one word.

Your UltraViolet library on Paramount's site may appear slightly broken

Unlike with every other UltraViolet retailer, the only option for viewing UltraViolet titles on iOS devices is by streaming, over WiFi, from paramountmovies.com. You can’t watch them in Flixster, so you can’t watch them offline on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. To clarify, they’ll show up in your collection in Flixster, but you can’t play or download them there. That also means you can’t watch them on your Google TV and you can’t watch them on your Android phone or tablet. In one test, we couldn’t even stream a title on a 4-month old Windows 7 PC with no explanation as to why.

Paramount’s Digital Store

Paramount is the first retailer to offer direct sales of UltraViolet digital titles. No discs—just the digital copy. They’ve rolled out an initial offering of about sixty titles, ranging from catalog titles Chinatown and the Beverly Hills Cop series to newer releases like Super 8 and the Paranormal Activity trilogy [please let this end as a trilogy]. Purchasing a title couldn’t be easier—select a title to buy, provide your credit card or PayPal account information, and the movie appears in your UltraViolet library. No shopping carts, no redemptions codes. It’s simple.

That’s about the end of the good news. First, let’s talk pricing. While we all might like to think that digital copies should be priced notably less than their packaged equivalents, we know from services like Amazon, iTunes, and VUDU that this is not usually the case. Most digital movies from these retailers cost between 7 and 15 dollars, or 15 to 20 dollars for HD. On iTunes, many of these digital movies do come with extras, like those included with packaged discs.

Paramount’s UltraViolet pricing is higher. Much higher. All catalog titles—whether two years old or fifty years old—are $12.99 in standard definition and $19.99 in HD. Newer titles are $16.99 in standard definition and $22.99 in HD. Many [why not all?] titles are also available to rent by streaming with the usual 30 day/48 hour limitations.

To put this pricing model in perspective, the guys on Seen in HD used this week’s Paranormal Activity 3 release as an example. For the UltraViolet movie in HD (with no extras), Paramount is charging $22.99. On Amazon, you can buy the Blu-ray combo pack with Blu-ray, DVD, and standard definition iTunes, Windows Media, and UltraViolet digital copies for $21.99.

For catalog titles, it’s even worse. Paramount is selling a standard definition UltraViolet copy of Airplane—a thirty year old film—for $12.99. A digital copy of the same movie costs $9.99 on iTunes or $6.49 on Amazon Instant Video. Or you can get a Zucker/Zucker/Abrahams Double Feature DVD including Airplane at Amazon for $9.99.

So there’s that. Then there’s the issue of playback. We already established that you can’t play Paramount’s UltraViolet titles on any disconnected device except for computers running their proprietary player. And since there aren’t any connected TVs or Blu-ray players available yet that support UltraViolet (and even those recently announced depend on Flixster), you probably can’t play these digital purchases on your TV. You can, of course, if you have a home theater PC, but even then you have to play them using Paramount’s custom desktop software, so forget about using your remote control.

HD playback is even more limited. To play Paramount’s HD UltraViolet videos, you must have an HDCP-compliant PC. Forget the Mac—it’s not supported. Your only hope of enjoying HD-quality video is on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 laptop or HTPC connected to an HDCP-compliant monitor with a DisplayPort, DVI-D or HDMI cable. Get all that?

And finally, while the other retailers download UltraViolet movies to your Videos folder as MP4 videos so they’re easily identifiable and transportable, Paramount instead plops thousands of tiny data files on your computer. The video we used for testing comprised 6,630 separate files with clever names like 00a4db57-7774-4907-b155-f054bc12981c. And now all of the other video programs that depend on your Videos folder get to parse through all of that crap.

Paramount clutters your Videos folder with thousands of data files

High Hopes Dashed

It’s widely recognized that UltraViolet has had a rocky start, and we’ve certainly hedged on recommending this technology, but we had high expectations for Paramount. These are the folks with some of the best movie franchises in their catalog, including, The Godfather, Indiana Jones, and Star Trek. Surely they’d want to make a big, successful splash at launch, right?

Instead, this launch is a big mess. It’s buggy, it’s extremely limited, and their digital titles are ridiculously expensive. Perhaps the only redeeming quality here is that Paramount is giving us an out as they continue to include iTunes and Windows Media digital copies in their combo packs. Our recommendation here should be obvious: save your money.