The online digital movies service Ultraviolet will shut this summer.
If you’ve been a purchaser of DVDs and Blu-rays over the past years, you may have noticed that some come with a leaflet offering a digital version. That you enter the digital code, and the film is added to an online library for you to download or stream.
That library comes under the Ultraviolet banner. And in the latest move to raise questions over digital streaming, it’s been announced that the Ultraviolet service is to close. It’s set to be shut down as of July 31st 2019, eight years after it launched.
This isn’t a massive surprise, given that Universal, Lionsgate and Fox pulled out of supporting the service at the end of last year.
The official guidance is for those who use Ultraviolet to ensure that their account is connected to at least one retailer – Flixster, for instance, is one of the most popular for Ultraviolet in the UK – to ensure continued access to their movies. If you don’t? We can but assume that you’ll lose access altogether.
The move is set to affect some 30 million users worldwide. It also paves the way for Disney to roll out its Movies Anywhere service outside of the US, as is widely expected.