Back in February, Disney launched its Disney Movies Anywhere (DMA) service on iOS. In effect, Disney movies you buy via iTunes are available in your DMA locker for you to stream on your iOS devices. Now, Android has joined the fray, meaning you can watch all those iOS-purchased Disney movies on your Android device and, if you buy movies on an Android device, you can watch them on your iOS device.
All well and good, but the thing I find the most fascinating about this is the thread of cross-compatibility it brings. Movies are data and this allows you to share and consume the same data on either side of the iOS/Android divide, just as you might an email, PDF, or even a Word document.
This kind of cross platform sharing is a big win for consumers, and it is a small step in the direction of eroding the platform specific ecosystem barricade. Imagine if you could cross platform share all your media, your movies, TV shows, documents, and music. Now that would be a disruption.
The disruption you mentioned already exists under the name “DRM Free”.
Common standards are good.
Is it streaming only from the locker or can the content be downloaded to the device? It’s one thing to stream via your home Wi-Fi (while most broadband plans have caps they’re pretty high), but it’s another if your kids are streaming Bambi from the backseat over cellular data 3 times in a row on that long road trip. Your overage charges could get really expensive really fast.
I really wish that Warner Bros would follow Disney’s lead here. The whole Ultraviolet/Flixster nonsense is extremely anti-consumer.
I can’t speak for the Android side, but on iOS/Mac, when you go to the Disney movie website to enter your redemption code, you get to choose which format to use, and there are plenty to choose from (iTunes, Vudu, etc). Then, you go to iTunes and enter the redemption code, and it the standard iTunes redemption code process.