Wavelength, which let people stream their friends' movies bought through UltraViolet, is shelved less than two weeks after launch
Peter Kafka / Re/code :
Context & Ripple Effects
Wavelength launched just a week earlier with a simple pitch: use your UltraViolet account to stream movies your friends bought, free of charge (the January 15 launch coverage framed it as sharing rather than piracy because every title was legitimately owned by someone in the loop). Shelving it inside two weeks means the service never got past its debut.
The broader corpus shows this isn't a one-off stumble. Months later, Wavelength would abandon sharing outright and reopen as a collection-browsing site, and the Aurous music service was hit with suits from Universal, Sony and Warner just three days after its own launch. The studios' tolerance for third-party services built on top of their ownership systems was close to zero.
First-order effects
- Wavelength's users immediately lose the ability to stream friends' UltraViolet-bought movies, and the founders' core product premise — sharing titles viewers own — is dead before it finds an audience.
- The studios' implied objection goes unanswered rather than resolved: unlike Aurous, which faced lawsuits from Universal, Sony and Warner within three days of launching (that rapid legal response set the template), Wavelength folds without a public fight over whether UltraViolet accounts permit friend-streaming.
Second-order effects
- Other startups eyeing UltraViolet or similar lockers as a distribution layer get a clear signal that rights holders will not license sharing features informally — pushing any successor toward either licensed deals or a non-sharing product like Wavelength's own later pivot to showcasing collections and browsing friends' libraries.
- UltraViolet itself loses a proof point: if even friendly, technically-authorized sharing gets shelved, the locker stays a pure redemption-and-playback store rather than becoming a social platform — a trajectory that ends with the service shutting down entirely in 2019.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — fast shutdowns here, near-instant litigation against Aurous — third-party innovation on top of Hollywood's digital-ownership systems becomes structurally unviable, leaving consumers only studio-controlled storefronts like Sony's later Ultra service, which sold 4K titles outright with no rental option.
- Digital 'ownership' reveals itself as a revocable permission granted by studios rather than a property right others can build on, pushing the industry further toward subscription and transactional rental models where the platform controls every viewing relationship.
The trend: Rights holders are rapidly shutting down third-party services built on shared digital movie ownership, consolidating control of how purchased content circulates inside studio-run platforms.