PlayStation Network's recent security issues have taught me a valuable lesson. With the flood of devices and services running through our office, I rationalized choosing a common password for my test accounts. Mea culpa, but the long process of changing so many accounts provided some insight into one of the challenges our industry is about to face: If content creators want to create direct relationships to the consumer, are we going to have to create separate accounts with each?
With so many different logins, passwords, and personal financial info floating about, there is some risk to the consumer in terms of password management, potential theft from hackers, and the simple fact that expiring credit cards must be updated every couple years. But there may be some good news coming to the account used to access digital content.
As the first UltraViolet content is promised to become available later this year, a major promise could be fulfilled: consumers may finally have the ability to access the content they have purchased across a number of the devices they already own. The ease of the DVD may finally be coming to the digital world. But there is a secondary promise: content will be provided around a single, cloud-based account and digital rights locker system that a consumer can access and use to stream or download a digital copy.
No doubt that if the vision is realized, digital content ACCESS will be somewhat simplified. However, content ACQUISITION is another story. Ultraviolet is merely the rights coordinator that verifies user access and passes them to the content source. It does not, however, include a common purchase platform, instead leaving that up whichever UltraViolet retailer consumers may choose. Sure, a retailer could be Best Buy or Blockbuster, but it could also be Fox or Sony or Vudu. Unless the consumer only purchases content from one source, multiple account scenarios are inevitable.
One interesting approach was recently rolled out by Microsoft. XBOX users can now use PayPal to purchase points.
What if such a common payment platform approach were extended elsewhere? What would it mean to the consumer experience? Smart TVs would be able to offer a simplified payment options both in app markets and in the apps themselves. Operators could enable pay-as-you-go VoD models and reduce any surprises when the regular pay-tv bill arrives. Consumers could have a common payment account to simplify digital purchases, manage their family's cross-platform transfers, decrease risk across having multiple accounts, and avoid the maintenance time of updating information across multiple accounts.
The chances of such a move actually happening at the industry-wide level is certainly doubtful (when is the last time we talked about a digital wallet or even OpenId?), but recent innovations by the payment gateways or credit card companies themselves are encouraging. In the meantime, I'm just hoping I don't lose my new spreadsheet of login details....
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