UltraViolet wins 160,000 digital movie accounts in ANZ

The film industry has declared Australian success for its play to keep DVD and Blu-ray sales alive amid a surge in legal and illegal digital watching.

Australia is second only to the US in adoption per capita of Digital UltraViolet for legal streaming and downloading of digital movies, according to the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which runs UltraViolet.

More than 160,000 people in Australian and New Zealand have opened UltraViolet accounts, DECE said.

UltraViolet, a digital streaming option bundled with DVDs and Blu-ray discs, has been available in Australia for one year. It is available in 10 countries around the world and there are 18 million accounts globally.

Supporters of UltraViolet include Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Roadshow Entertainment, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group Australia and Paramount Pictures.

However, it may be a stretch to declare piracy dead in Australia.

A Torrentfreak on Arrested Development last year showed that 15 per cent of people who pirated the new season of Arrested Development were located in Australia, second behind only the US (18 per cent).

Earlier in the year, the same website reported that nearly 10 per cent of illegal downloads of the then most recent season of Game of Thrones came from Australia.

In addition, The Australian recently estimated that Netflix has between 50,000 and 200,000 subscribers located in Australia. That’s despite Netflix not having a presence in Australia, forcing users to subscribe to VPNs to access the geo-restricted content.

Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam

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