Say goodbye to your DVDs and even your Blu-Rays, because Disney’s about to bring watching movies at home into a new era. At the beginning of the month the Walt Disney Corporation unveiled a new technology called KeyChest.
KeyChest allows consumers to purchase television shows or movies, store them on remote servers, and then play them on various media devices, from TV’s to computers to mobile phones. KeyChest is expected to go on sale by the end of 2010.
I don’t blame you if you can’t get your head around KeyChest. I couldn’t, at first. But after thinking about it more, the concept isn’t as strange as I first thought.
Most of us have already heard of streaming movies on the internet through programs like Netflix on Demand, and being able to access that content through the web browsers on our phones.
But what does this mean for you? It’s hard to tell, because even though KeyChest was announced in October and unveiled in January, there are still few details available. However, it seems that technology like KeyChest might finally grant consumers digital rights to their films and shows.
Your digital rights are your right to ownership of a particular piece of media. Previously, consumers only owned the exact copy of the VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray they’d purchased.
Any copying of that material, even if it was a transfer from VHS to DVD or from DVD to iPod, was technically illegal, though companies rarely chose to prosecute in such cases. With the advent of technology like KeyChest, consumers will now own their purchased movies/tv shows in any format.
At first, KeyChest seems perfect for me. My husband and I like to play our DVDs on our computer, which is hooked up to the television. KeyChest will make that even easier. But I am still left with many questions.
How much will KeyChest cost? Blu-Rays already often cost about $10 more than DVDs, so how much more expensive will KeyChest content be?
What I’d most like to see, however, is an exact list of the formats included within KeyChest. As excited as I am to have the right to transfer my movies to digital form, making viewing things with my techie husband’s fancy media setup easier, I still want physical copies of my movies.
The problem with new technologies is that it takes a very long time for them to become standard. In the age of Blu-Ray I still know many people with VHS collections.
It’ll take at least a decade, if not more, for KeyChest technologies to become standard. In the meantime, I think it’s important that physical copies of movies and television shows are still available.
That way I have something I can bring over to a friend’s house for a movie night without having to wonder if they’ve got the latest technology to play my KeyChest purchase.
And that brings to mind one final question: if physical copies aren’t considered part of the KeyChest package, does that mean if I want to play my movies in all formats I have to make two purchases, one digital and one physical? That sounds excessive to me, especially if I’m already paying a large sum for the actual rights to a movie or show.
But given that KeyChest’s just been announced, there’s clearly still time left for the execs at Disney to work out all the bugs in this promising new technology. I know I’m looking forward to finding out more about it in the future.
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