【Risa Sakamoto Archives】

One platform to rule them all,Risa Sakamoto Archives one platform to bind them.

Wait -- isn't that a reference from the Warner Bros. property The Lord of the Rings, you ask? Isn't this an item about the new "Disney Movies Anywhere?"

And so it is. Because Disney Movies Anywhere is now "Movies Anywhere." Which means it isn't just for Disney movies anymore.

Starting Wednesday night, for the first time in the history of "owning" digital movies, there's a place where you can store and access nearly all of your digital movie purchases from Disney, Warner Bros., Fox, Sony and Universal Pictures. (Paramount, home of the Star Trekand Transformersfilms, is the lone major holdout. Boooo, Paramount.)

Originally just for Disney movies, the 3-year-old artist formerly known as Disney Movies Anywhere now ports over titles from the other four biggies -- as long as you bought those movies on Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu.

All users need to do is link those accounts through their Movies Anywhere account and voila!, there they all are, your movies in one place, the dream is real. (You can use the digital codes from subsequent physical DVD/Blu-ray purchases to synch them into your library, too.)

Movies Anywhere can be accessed through an array of devices including Amazon Fire, most Android and Apple thingys, Chromecast, Roku, ye olde "internet" and others -- with more to come, because we live in the future.

I was shown a demo Wednesday that was sufficiently nifty: If you have, say, movies you bought on iTunes and Vudu accounts in your past, you simply sign in to those accounts through Disney Movies Anywhere and they immediately show up in your library on the platform.

And no matter what studio made them, copies of those titles -- more than 7,000 all lumped together -- live on the new platform, so you're not streaming them through a third-party client (and isn't it nice to know that your locker of digital movies is on the servers of the company most likely to survive, or possibly even cause, the singularity?).

Ultraviolet, the previous multi-studios digital movies locker that no one liked and never took off, was missing a couple of key ingredients that Movies Anywhere now has: interlinking with big digital retailers like Amazon, Google and iTunes -- and movies made by Walt Disney Studios, meaning Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Disney Animation Studios and literally everything else kids trapped in minivans will quietly sit to watch.

Disney never licensed to Ultraviolet (most studios aren't calling it "Ultraviolet" on disc packages anymore, just generic "digital movies") because it knew it would eventually create its own thing on the back of its powerful library. Now the rest are hopping onboard, too (boo Paramount, boooooo).

You can also purchase movies from participating studios on Movies Anywhere -- by briefly and seamlessly taking you out to one of its retail partners -- which then appear in your Movies Anywhere library. And new sign-ups get free copies of Ghostbusters, Ice Age, Big Hero 6, Jason Bourneand The LEGO Movie, depending on which services they link.

The interface is pretty simple, if nothing special -- you can sort by "recently added," A-to-Z and Z-to-A, but there's no categories or customization. Movies Anywhere says those capabilities will be coming, but for now, if you own a huge library of digital movies, you'll just have to know what you want to find.

There's also no rental or streaming option here -- Movies Anywhere is just a platform for digital sell-through, which is the most expensive digital option, but also the first available, sometimes weeks before physical discs and many months before streaming.

It's not yet clear what Disney is getting out of this; they wouldn't tell me what, if any, slice of a sale they get from a film that gets ported over to their platform from another studio. It may very well be nothing, other than the honor of minding the store.

But Disney Movies Anywhere might be the solution to a bigger problem than just another Mouse House revenue stream: The movie industry has been trying to crack the digital-locker model for many years, and Ultraviolet may wind up being the Beta to Disney Movies Anywhere's VHS -- a format that worked fine but was ultimately leapfrogged as consumers made their choice.

Buying digital movies outright for as much as $19.99 isn't for everyone. But everyone who buys digital movies outright is going to want to sign up for this service whose core function has been a long time coming.