[basch]

It happened with DVD and Blu-Ray players. Standard delivery/transport/storage mechanism, from all the studios, that play in any certified player.

I didnt need a separate WB, Disney, Sony hardware device to watch movies, my Sony played them all.

[guitarbill]

Ha, if only is was that straight forward.

For DVD, there were almost two standards (yet again), but computer manufacturers Apple, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft basically forced the video industry to stop messing around and use the same format.

But otherwise? Phonograph cylinders vs disks (records), VHS vs Betamax, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, etc. XBox vs Playstation vs Switch vs PC exclusives. The list goes on, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

[basch]

I am ok with multiple competing standards or two projects merging into one. The difference is, despite licensing, the dvd and blu ray specs are published standards.

What Im less ok with is this completely proprietary vudu, ultraviolet, moviesanywhere, fandango, itunes, googleplay, amazon digital locker tangled web mess. I should have ONE master account at ANY platform that tracks my ownership of digital keys, and it should grant me access to play it back on any platform that chooses to serve me the video file. If I decide to move from google to itunes I should be able to export or transfer my key library. If I have a google account, paid for Bumblebee in Play Movies, Apple should choose to honor my request for playback on my Apple TV, and cover the bandwidth. It would be in the best interest of making their product Just Work. And if Apple only wants to offer files for keys I have stored in their service, it should seamlessly fall back to grabbing the file from google without the user having to do a damn thing. It should just silently work. As a movie watcher I dont need or shouldnt need to care if the file is streaming from Apple or Google. (but if i were apple I would want full control of the video quality on an apple tv.)

None of this "you can load it into moviesanywhere and see it in vudu, but then you cant see it in intues or ultraviolet." Permanently locking the keys to proprietary temporal services seems explicity designed to have these services ebb and flow into new services and magicaly lose my keys from time to time, or make them nearly inaccessable if they can only flow into one specific other site.

Do they want my business? I am willing to pay, if it means not balancing full price access to nyt, wsj, foreign policy, bloomberg, wired, ars, etc etc etc. I cant just sign up for every single one of those, and they cant expect me to. Im not going to devote myself to just reading one or two of them. So either they can cater to people who are willing to spread money around, little bits to each of them, or they can ignore that market and lose potential business. Ive paid for those products in the past, but now I'll just go read something else.