UltraViolet a non-starter in the U.K.

UltraViolet, which struggled to get off the ground with consumers in the United States who said it was confusing to register with and use, is getting a similar reaction in Great Britain, where satellite operator BSkyB is calling for it to be simpler and more customer focused.

Ian Lewis, director of Sky Movies and Sky Box Office for BSkyB, told an audience at the PEVE Entertainment 2013 conference in London that if “it takes me four to five minutes to explain to my CEO, it’s not ready for the public. That’s four minutes more than you get to convince consumers.” The technology creates a “digital locker” giving consumers access across all of their devices to premium video they’ve purchased.

In the U.S., retailers like Walmart, Amazon and Barnes & Noble (but not Apple) all are part of the UltraViolet union. Likewise, most major studios have bought in to the program that is the baby of the Digital Entertainment Consortium. Hollywood wants to love it, because Hollywood wants to be in the cloud, where, increasingly, consumers are. Plus, studios have seen their former (hoped for) cash cow, the DVD take a nose dive. Sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs have plummeted from $14 billion in 2004 to less than $9 billion in 2012.

UltraViolet’s uptake in the U.S. has been accelerating, but it really has been achingly slow. At the start of this year, there were only some 10 million users registered, and just 8,700 titles available (more than 3,500 of them from Warner Bros.). That paucity of content is another issue, Lewis said: “I’m not sure that even all the Hollywood studios are lined up on exactly what they think Ultraviolet is.”

That’s light years better than in Great Britain, where it is just becoming part of the conversation. In fact, on a consumer panel made up of 18-year-olds at the PEVE conference, not a single one of them said they had any idea what UltraViolet was. Not surprisingly, most did admit to knowing how to access content illegally.