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Expiring DVDs - new technology, same old bag of tricks
By Joshua O'Connell
Posted Thursday, July 31, 2003
The DVD is quite something, isn't it? It has become a beacon for what new technology can do: the public has accepted it as a format quicker than any other music or movie format before it, and has quickly proven to be a better format for VHS thanks to the ability to, among other things, skip to another portion of a disc without having to fast-forward through part of the tape.
<p>However, the format hasn't been without confusion and controversy. A format war has erupted between two emerging standards based on a higher-density disc that stores more data. DVD burners currently take two different types of media, depending on what you buy, and they have varying levels of compatibility with older DVD players. There's DVD audio, which is a higher-end audio disc that can play on DVD players. And good ol' stand-alone DVD players for the TV generally don't have burning capabilities on them, unless you're willing to spend at least $400, and more likely over $500 for a decent unit.
<p>That hasn't stopped people from trying different ways to expand the market. In the late '90s, Circuit City marketed Divx, a rental-type disc that worked by connecting to your phone line. (This isn't to be confused with DivX, a fairly new movie format that creates high-quality digital files and takes up less hard drive space.) That attempt failed miserably for a couple of reasons: you had to pay around $5 for your first two-day rental, and $3 after that for another one. You had to have a special DVD player to play the discs, and you had to have a phone line connected to the unit for it to be able to send and receive information relating to purchases and rentals you made with Divx discs.
<p>Most importantly, despite being able to claim a 20% market share of all DVD players having the Divx add-on, Circuit City entered the market early in the game, when DVD players were still quite pricey; charged $100 more for a unit with Divx compatibility' and was unable to make it available in stores other than its own and a handful of smaller chains. You'd figure Best Buy wouldn't touch it with a stick if their competitor owned it, and that obviously didn't help.
<p>So with all this going against it, it shut down, and hasn't been tried again. Until now.
<p>Buena Vista, the movie arm of giant Disney, is making a foray into limited use DVDs. They are about to begin marketing a two-day DVD, which has a chemical on it that begins to change when exposed to air. While the DVD will play just fine for a 48-hour period, the disc will eventually turn black, keeping the laser from reading the disc and ultimately causing it not to play. It's a very "Mission: Impossible" kind of concept.
<p>But can it work? Yes, DVD is much more accepted now, and is in a good majority of homes in the U.S. Buena Vista claims it allows them to be able to get them into retail stores, just like Divx offered a few years ago, meaning people don't have to go to Blockbuster to pick it up if another store is closer. And the ability to just watch a movie once, especially if you don't have the urge to watch it again or don't like to watch movies repeatedly, may be a more affordable alternative.
<p>Unfortunately, optimism seems wasted here. The format's problems are similar to Divx's, with a few problematic twists of its own. First, people will tend to not want to pay whatever price Buena Vista is asking, because they'll have to eat the costs of manufacturing, packaging, and so on for a disc that will work for all of 48 hours. Blockbuster is a bigger threat this time, thanks to their offering five-day rentals on a majority of their offerings. The discs become coasters after two days, something many people have too many of already thanks to CD burners, and that means all the packaging that came with it is essentially garbage too. And piracy is now an option that could thwart this opportunity, thanks to DVD copying programs that would allow people to pay less, make a copy, and not ever have to buy the full version.
<p>Even worse, this format lacks something Divx had the foresight to offer - a chance to upgrade to an unrestricted version. While Divx was around, people could pay a fee around $15 to upgrade to Divx Silver, which allowed people to watch the movie unrestricted. Added to the $5 cost of the original disc, the cost to own a Divx disc permanently (until the system was shut down for good in 2001, anyway) was $20, around the price people pay even now for a DVD movie that has unrestricted use. There is no such option with Buena Vista's model, which means people who want to own the disc after "buying" the EV-D discs, as they'll be dubbed, will still have to pay full price for the unrestricted DVD. This is not exactly a generous model, but Buena thinks people will buy into this.
<p>I doubt they will. Stores won't want to give up much of their precious floor space to a model that's already been tried and failed miserably. Rental chains like Blockbuster won't have the incentive, or room, to give this model a try. Consumers already have enough options to reject this one, including rental chains like Blockbuster or the all-you-can-eat model of Netflix. There's just too many successful models already in the field for something like this to work. Experiments are fine, but I just don't think this one's worth the time.
