Enlarge (credit: Movies Anywhere)
A new service launched late yesterday promises to make streaming your favorite purchased movies easier by putting them all in one place. The new free app Movies Anywhere acts like a digital locker for the movies you’ve paid for through various online retailers, including Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu. Signing up for a Movies Anywhere account gives you access to the digital locker, which you can then populate with purchased or redeemed movies by logging in to the accounts you have with those online retailers.
It takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work for a service like this to flourish. It’s not easy to access movies you’ve purchased from an online retailer from another service. Typically, users have to go back and forth between Amazon, Google, iTunes, and Vudu to watch the titles they purchased through each outlet. According to a report from the Verge, Movies Anywhere can collect all those titles in one place because it’s built off of the same digital rights system architecture (called Keychest) that Disney first developed for its service Disney Movies Anywhere.
Disney launched its service in 2014 and it allowed users to get access to all of the company’s titles in one place. Movies Anywhere is using the same architecture with the blessing and collaborations of five Hollywood studios: Walt Disney Studios (which includes Disney, Pixar, Marvel Studios, and Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Entertainment. While discussions are ongoing with Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate to join the service, Movies Anywhere will not launch with any titles from those studios. However, that still means the service has over 7,300 titles in its library already.
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