From the iCloud to UltraViolet, more and more movies, music and TV shows are floating up into the cloud.
Consumers, it seems, are slowly warming to the idea of storing content digitally, as long as they don’t have to pay for access to digital lockers, according to a new report called Storing Entertainment Content in the Cloud from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“What we’re finding is being said loud and clear is that the most important benefit of these cloud services is that they are free,” Matthew Lieberman, director of PwC’s entertainment & media practice, told TheWrap. “And that all these really cool features pale in comparison to price.”
Also read: UltraViolet Backers Get Ready to Make More Noise in 2012
Roughly 70 percent of the 502 people surveyed said that they would be less likely to use cloud technology if a $25 to $99 annual fee were applied to a service. That could be problematic for cloud services that are hoping to find extra revenue through subscriptions or annual fees.
The good news is that respondents to the survey were largely enthusiastic about the possibilities of cloud technology. Nearly 90 percent of survey respondents said they were “somewhat” to “very interested” in the concept of digital lockers.
Moreover, thanks to the pile-up of new cloud based services from major corporations, many of the people surveyed expressed awareness of what digital lockers could offer them. Nearly two-thirds of the consumers surveyed said they feel confident about their awareness and understanding of both digital and cloud storage.
Lieberman said that some of that confidence in their cloud-knowledge might be misplaced.
“I think there’s a distinction between what consumers believe their knowledge is and what they actually know,” he said. “Over 61 percent believe they have an understanding of what storing content in the cloud means, but they have quite a varied understanding of what that entails.”
The reason for these dramatically different interpretations have to do with the still relatively low adoption rates of digital lockers and the flood of services on the market. The past year has seen the introduction of UltraViolet, the cloud-based platform backed by most major studios, as well as digital rights lockers from Amazon and Apple.
Many of these services are offered on different terms and geared toward different forms of content. For instance, Apple’s service is primarily concerned with music, whereas UltraViolet is most concerned with storing films.
How popular these services are is still up for some debate. Roughly 750,000 UltraViolet accounts have been set up following a modest promotional push, the platform's backers announced last month. That is dwarfed by the 85 million users who have signed up for Apple's iCloud service, but again how active these accounts are is unclear.
The knowledge of digital lockers might be spotty, but older consumers were more attracted to the concept of clouds than younger consumers.
