Paramount's UltraViolet Cloud-Based Movies Now Available

Though Paramount will not be the only group to have UltraViolet digital movies in the near future, they're currently the first and only group to offer the service through their site. What UltraViolet offers is a copy of your movie "in the cloud" right after purchasing it in physical or digital form. In this way the film industry hopes not only to offer its consumer base a new bit of value, but to fight off piracy as this process may prove to be the easiest way to have your videos anywhere, anytime.

The only drawback here in this whole process you're about to understand implicitly is the fact that you will not be able to download these cloud-based movies for offline viewing. When your movie is in Paramount's cloud, you can stream it over the internet on your iOS device or through your mobile hotspot, wi-fi, or the equivalent, but no offline viewing in any way at all will be up for grabs. Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone are currently not connected to this service and set-top TV boxes and systems like the Xbox, Wii, and more are not able to work with this service at the moment either.

Right now you're going to be paying $12.99 for the "SD" quality on one of these digital format films and $19.99 for HD. That's more than you'd pay for a DVD for certain, and right around the same price as a Blu-ray disk right off the shelf. While this idea seems like a great one in some places, especially for people who have iPhones and also a bit of money burning a hole in their pocket, but there doesn't seem to be room for growth if no inclusion of the rest of the devices listed above come in quick. A person like myself will be willing to connect a computer to my HDTV, but the general public might not.

[via Paramount]