New standard for digital movie exchange

Today five of the six big studios, together with various technology partners, announced a new standard for digital movies: the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE). The standard will allow movies to be played on different devices and exchanged between them.

Being unable to play movies on the devices they want is one of the main complaints  of consumers worldwide. With the new standard this issue should be remedied. Under the new standard, consumers will store a digital ‘receipt’ of their movie purchase online. In this way the rights to a movie are not bound to the carrier or device, but rather to the consumer. This will makei to possible to play a single movie on any device that supports DECE. It also opens up new possibilities for media consumption. For instance, a consumer could access his or her movie collection on the go, by tapping into the internet cloud.

Unfortunately, Disney and Apple are not participating in the new standard. They are expected to unveil their own standard by the end of January, likely coinciding with the launch of Apple’s rumoured tablet device.