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I’ve been using Movies Anywhere since the service launched two weeks ago and have started buying VOD movies again for the first time in years. If that was the aim for the five Hollywood studios involved — and it definitely was — then more power to them.

And more power to you.

After you download the Movies Anywhere app and enter your Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play logins, you’ll have an instant catalog of roughly 80 percent of the digital movies you’ve ever bought from those four retailers. And you’ll get digital copies of those movies on all four of those services — plus on the simple, intuitive Movies Anywhere app — and can watch them on all of the major smartphones, tablets and streaming devices.

But wait, there’s more:

You can enter the digital codes from your Blu-ray and DVD cases into your Movies Anywhere account and stream those titles immediately on Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.
For discs don’t have digital codes, you can add many for $2 each or upgrade DVD titles to Blu-ray quality for $5 each by scanning the barcodes with Vudu’s smartphone app.
Apple TV will automatically upgrade select titles to 4K HDR for free. (You will need the new Apple TV 4K to be able to actually watch them in 4K HDR.)
Movies Anywhere is in discussions with smaller studios that would bring the available catalog from 80 percent to more than 90 percent of home-video titles.
You’ll get digital copies of Ghostbusters (2016) and Ice Age when you add one retailer login and Big Hero 6, Jason Bourne and The LEGO Movie when you add another.

If you have a large movie catalog scattered across numerous retailers and have long wanted to consolidate them into your own personal streaming service, Movies Anywhere is the biggest thing to happen to streaming video since Netflix. Karin Gilford, the Movies Anywhere general manager, says the service has already been a big hit with consumers.

“The day after we launched we saw a lot of power users who have been waiting for a system like this for years, so we’ve processed some extremely large libraries,” Gilford says. “We’ve been watching some home-entertainment message boards and Twitter and some of our own socials, and there are definitely people with more than a thousand titles in their collections.”

Decider sat down with Gilford to talk about the new service.

DECIDER: Walk me through what happens when I buy a particular title on a particular platform, say, I buy Baby Driver on iTunes.

Karin Gilford: You can buy Baby Driver through the Movies Anywhere app, which will prompt you to link through to iTunes or one of the other digital retailers, or you can purchase the movie directly from one of those retailers. If you have downloaded the Movies Anywhere app, linked your iTunes account, and linked it to other digital retailers, the movie will show up in your Movies Anywhere library and in the retailer libraries that you’ve linked to Movies Anywhere. In most cases, that will happen within seconds after you make the purchase.

As you watch the movie in one app, will it sync the playhead across different platforms?

We think that’s the expectation of users today, so we came out of the gate with that feature. If you start watching a movie on your iPhone, you can pick it up where you left off on Roku or Apple TV or a tablet. You can also have up to six sub-accounts that can also have their own viewing histories and progress.

Did you get any pushback from the digital retailers that this will flatten their market power and turn them into commodity providers?

We developed the system with the retail partners involved at every step. What I’ve seen is that eliminating confusing and creating a great user experience where viewers have freedom and choice allows all boats to rise. That benefits the studios, the retail partners and the platforms.

Is the business proposition for everyone — the studios, the retailers, the platforms, the consumers — that people will buy more movies and watch more movies if you let them create their own catalog across the major retailers and the major platforms?

It’s a couple of things. We’ve seen over and over again in digital — and I’ve been in digital for a long time — the better the user experience, reliability, seamlessness, usability and ease of use are, the more engagement will go up. As a result of that transactions will go up — whether that’s ad views, subscription retention or purchases. That’s the expectation of the studios and the retailers. We can already see in the response we’re getting that people will buy more movies when they don’t have to worry where they’ll be able to watch them.

Did the discussion for the project start with the studios or with the retailers?

I’ve been at Disney for several years and started running this team in January, but there have been discussions for a long time at various industry forums between the studios and the retailers. The studio partners are the retailers have all been pointing toward a missing of providing a better consumer experience.

The on-boarding and overall UI are super smooth. Is it based on the code for the Disney Anywhere app, or is this a brand new app?

The front-end code for all the apps — iOS, Android, connected TV — is all brand-new code, so everything the consumer is seeing is new. We do leverage a core piece of back-end technology called KeyChest that was the foundation for Movies Anywhere and controls the traffic between the retailers and the film catalogs, and we upgraded that as we brought on the other studios.

Is Disney taking advantage of this project for other OTT or authenticated apps?

The system is dedicated to Movies Anywhere, which is focused on the purchase window for feature films. That’s the only application in the suite of apps across Disney that are servicing the first home-entertainment window, so this system is dedicated to consumers buying feature films.

Blu-ray and DVD digital codes for watching movies on streaming has been messy because the studios have not all been on the same system. What is Movies Anywhere’s approach to streamlining that?

Movies Anywhere totally fixes that problem. The code-redemption system that will built into Movies Anywhere will honor almost any code. If it’s a feature film code from one of the five participating studios — Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Sony or Disney — you can redeem the code right in the app, and the film will show up almost instantly. That solves a huge problem in the marketplace in what has been a very fragmented market.

If you try to redeem a code for a title that we can’t fulfill — like a Paramount title or a Lionsgate title or a TV title — the app will point you in the right direction without burning up your code. We tried to create a code-redemption starting point with Movies Anywhere that will either redeem that code or tell you where you can go redeem it.

So you if you try to redeem a code for John Wick, which is a Lionsgate title, Movies Anywhere will say, “Hey, you need to go redeem this on iTunes”?

It should provide you a link based on that code that will take you to the right place to redeem that Lionsgate code.

Have you had discussions with Amazon or other physical-media retailers about redeeming those codes automatically when someone purchases a Blu-ray or DVD?

We were focused out of the gate on making sure we could build a digital space where consumers could build their catalogs. As the product evolves, we’ll continue talking to our retailers about ways to improve the experience.

I looked at U.S. box office returns for 2017, and the five studio partners in Movies Anywhere represent about 75 percent of the market. Adding Lionsgate and Paramount would bring it close to 90 percent. How close are you to adding them to the service?

Consumers would love to have Lionsgate, Paramount and other studio content in the service, and we really hope those studios will join us. We’ll continue talking to them.

Does having Comcast-owned Universal on board mean you’re likely to have Comcast-owned Xfinity X1 and FandangoNOW on board as retailers at some point?

Similarly to the content side, we want to continue to add retailers. We’ll announce more retailers in the future. We’ve built a really comprehensive system, and we hope to integrate more of the places where people buy movies over time.

It sounds like you built Movies Anywhere now to become something like an industry consortium that will continue becoming more comprehensive over time.

Not to diminish the industry, but we built it for consumers. We wanted the account linking, the code redemption, the interface, etc., to be very consumer-friendly, and that means being comprehensive.

From your perspective, what would you say is the reason that Blu-ray, DVD and digital movie sales have declined significantly?

Digital sales, based on the sales data provided by Digital Entertainment Group, are actually up year over year. I’m curious to see how Movies Anywhere will accelerate digital ownership. People will always buy movies on physical media, which I think is closer to books — where there’s an ecosystem for physical and digital — than music. The digital market share for movies is lower than it should be, and one of the key issues could be the idea of consolidating your collection and being able to use with different retailers that Movies Anywhere solves.

Movies Anywhere should go a long way to convincing consumers that they’re not going to lose their movie libraries from a retailer going out of business or having movies in a lot of different places.

The other thing is that people take a lot of pride in displaying their DVD collections, and I’m excited to see if we can bring some of that sensibility to digital. Movies Anywhere is a film-focused product, and there’s a lot of things we can do with giving people the tools to organize their library that could start to bring the idea of collecting movies more into digital.

To the extent that the service is making it easy for people to consolidate their movies — including their Disney movies — into one app, do you have concerns about that competing with the streaming service that Disney is launching in 2019 that would presumably include a lot of those same movies?

My perspective is that purchasing and streaming have lived side by side for a long time, and I think they’ll continue to do so. Purchasing films is the first opportunity that people have to watch these films outside of the theater — in their home or on the go — and I think both of those pieces of our business will continue to thrive.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.