In a preemptive strike against its rival the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, the Walt Disney company is expected to launch this month a ‘cloud’-based technology called Keychest designed to allow users to buy permanent, on-demand access to its content across multiple platforms.

Keychest is aimed at solving the dual problems of movie downloads: the difficulty of playing back a movie on devices other than a PC or laptop, and limited storage space on those computers' hard drives. The technology would rely on cloud computing, used for Web-based apps such as Google Docs, which stores files on remote servers that can be accessed from any device, as opposed to being downloaded to a computer.

Keychest would allow consumers to pay a single price for permanent access to a movie or TV show across multiple digital platforms and devices. It could also facilitate other services such as online movie subscriptions.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney has been demonstrating the technology for other movie studios and technology companies in a bid to get them to sign on.

Market research firm In-Stat sees Disney pushing the envelope as a global media company searching for the best way to succeed in the “all electronic” digital age, but it is not convinced Keychest will replace discs just yet.

“The idea of a secure digital storage locker up ‘in the cloud’ will eventually make a lot of sense, and will also help interested consumers gain easy and portable access to a lot of their content,” according to In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold. “Right now, if you have oodles of videos, music and photos spread across a mismatched bundle of hard disk drives and USB devices, you may actually desire a way to just have all your stuff available from one network service that can deliver the content to anywhere you happen to be.

"And the big upside is that when your local drive crashes, your content will still be safe, up in the cloud. But it’s going to take some time to get there, and not all consumers are going to sign up. Some of us will continue to buy packaged media and take our chances.”

In-Stat sees a lot of compelling reasons for Disney to forge ahead. Disney is the world’s second largest media conglomerate behind Time-Warner. Their holdings range from Marvel Entertainment and Pixar for animation, to teen sensations Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, the international hit, “High School Musical”, pre-teen sites like Club Penguin, and ESPN, the 800-pound gorilla of pay-TV sports networks.

All these properties have major web sites, and these web sites keep tens of millions of consumers connected to Disney, on all continents and at all times of the day. For at least a percentage of the Disney audience, having the freedom to acquire the digital rights to a piece of Disney content, and having that content available at any time, in any location, on any device, will drive incremental revenues into Mickey’s treasure chest.

As more and more devices appear that are capable of connecting to the Internet, either on a wire, or with a wireless device, the importance of content portability and content permanence will encourage development of cloud-based initiatives, says In-Stat.

Story filed 08.11.09