Forget Blu-ray, UltraViolet is the newest thing!

Blu-ray is so last week. At least that’s what yet another new technology aimed at home entertainment consumers wants you to believe. While Blu-ray only has about 15% of the market share, a group of studios, retailers, rental services and hardware manufacturers are betting you’re already looking for the best thing. Hence, UltraViolet.

UltraViolet is just a fancy form of digital locker / cloud-based subscription services that have been in existence for a while but in this case it would let you watch official releases of movies, TV shows, music and games. So how does this all work?

Like other similar services, you pay for a subscription and then you can either upload existing movies to your account or head to Best Buy, for example, and purchase a movie on UltraViolet (it will then be immediately unlocked on your account). Once a media file (be it movie, TV show, game…) is available on your account, you’ll be able to access it from any pretty much any software-updateable device. For example, you could start a movie on your TV, watch a little bit more on your laptop and then finish it off on your iPhone.

To be fair, the companies behind UltraViolet aren’t trying to eliminate Blu-ray or hard copies of movies. In fact with almost all of the major movie studios behind the project (with the exception of Disney who is partnering with Apple on their own cloud-based service, KeyChest), UltraViolet will simply become another feature when you buy a DVD or Blu-ray. You’ll see the little logo and know that you can now upload that movie to your account and be able to watch the digital copy wherever you go.

UltraViolet is still working out some technical issues and will begin beta testing later this year. It’s unclear exactly when it will become available to the public but I’m guessing probably not until 2011.