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Limited-Use DVD Technology
ps_inkling writes: "Two companies are creating different techniques to make DVD discs unusable after a set period of time. SpectraDisc has a patent on a limited-play DVD technology; FlexPlay is currently developing limited play DVD technology. The SpectraDisc technique is to coat the DVD with a film, then wrap the DVD in an anaerobic package.
The idea is to sell these 'play-once' DVD movies at a substantial discount to regular DVDs as a way to compete with pay-per-view or movie ticket outlets."
"creating more waste faster than ever imagined"
I don't get it.
So, now we see why they were so keen to eliminate DVD copying software. If only they hadn't made DVD copying a complete and utter technical impossibility.
Will this technology fade once DVD-R comes into the mainstream?
0x0D 0x0A
And it failed miserably. My uncle's got a DivX player that's near-useless. He should've got one that also played regular DVDs - but hey, he was an early adopter. I don't think limited-use discs or other media makes sense. People want to *own* the movies and music they buy. Otherwise, everyone would listen to the radio all the time, or get pay-per-view movies on their cable or satellite. But hey - what do I know? I'm just an American Consumer - I vote with my dollar. And my dollar won't be buying a use-once disc. Unless you can rip it to DivX;-).
The biggest problem with DivX was the requirement for specific hardware. If these DVDs play in any DVD player, and they're sold for cheap (approximately rental price), it certainly could work.
I rent movies constantly, and buy those I like enough to watch again. If I could pick up a disc for $3-4 and not have to return it to the store, that could be extremely convenient. As long as I don't have to buy a special player, hook it up to my phone line, and shop only at Circuit City. That's why DivX failed, not because the concept was necessarily bad.
As far as I'm concerned, the concept is flawed, and I will vote against it with my dollars.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
If I just wanted to watch a movie once, I'd rent it from my local Blockbuster or similar video store. Those places carry DVDs now.
But if I buy a product, I damn well want to use it more than once! (Well, a data-carrying product, anyway. Food is a different story...)
I'm sure they could have tried to make VHS tapes, audio cassettes, and so on, that would only play once. Nobody was fool enough to try it until now.
I predict this thing will crash and burn at least as badly as DivX did.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
The difference between Circuit City's fiasco and this is that divx required a special player which dialed an 800 number to see if you're eligible to play the disk. That part wasn't so horrible. The bad part is that CC wasn't making any money with it so they dropped it and screwed all the people who had paid extra for the specialized players.
;)
These new ideas are entirely different.. they rely on the disc itself to limit how many times you can play it. I, for one, wouldn't mind paying $1-2 for a DVD which allows me to watch a movie a couple times until the coating on the disk makes it unreadable. You only have to read it once to rip it.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I'm not sure if there are any official numbers attesting to this, but the few people I know of that actually spend money on pay-per-view (and I do mean "few," since it tends to cost more than a 3- or 5-day VHS rental) videotape the PPV broadcast.
All I can see this doing is either removing the middleman between the movie company and the "unauthorized" copiers or flopping on its face when these kinds of people run into copy protection.
An introduction of this technology will almost certainly increase DVD piracy, as people will see an opportunity to get a full movie cheap. FlexPlay, at least, claims their discs will work in all DVD drives, including DVD-ROMs. The market for DVD burners, currently technophile and media professional toys, may witness a small upsurge in demand, and ripping tools will become popular as the damn-copyright set notes the obvious ways around the time limit - make copies of the discs.
There's no way this can come to any good. Abort mission.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
To me this would cause more piracy. If I rented a disc and knew it was going to expire the first thing I'd do is copy it. Once copied I'd know it couldn't expire so I'd give the original to the kids and put the backup into my own collection.
I do the same thing with CD's now. I make a copy which I use, keep a copy on the hdd, and put the original into a safe spot. I've done the same thing with DVD's from time to time but not as much as the cases for DVD's seem to work better in my experience.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A play once dvd priced at $5.88 or just a buck would severely break a store. Customers wont know the difference from the play once dvd's or the standard dvds. They will see that cheap price for say, Fast and the furious and nab it before someone else does. Then when they get home the kids will spark up the dvd player while mom is in the kitchen cooking. Mom calls the kids for dinner and the kids stop the dvd player and have dinner. The family retires back to the living room and starts the dvd from the beginning only to find mom is not going to see any of it because the dvd has alredy burned off it's boot sector.
You will turn up with upset customers, fast.
I work at a walmart in the nortwest houston area. I can vouch for the fact that customers are not very quick at understanding things much less take the time to read anything. All they see is a Price, and an object they want. A while back we were stocking Jarassic part 3 in dvd. One full screen, one wide screen. Most customers dont have a clue there a difference and have a problem with the wide screen letter box format. Most of them come back and ask about full screen. They didnt see a little sliver of text at the bottom of the dvd that said wide screen.
Customers arent very bright when they come in stores. They will plow through water on the floor, spilled legos, anything. They never see signs higher than 6 foot, (never can find the 2 signs in the store both with 3 ft letters saying restrooms).
Customers seem to check their brains at the door and dont understand what Out of stock means and ask, "well, what does that mean?" Out of stock means out of stock, there is not a magic hat we can pull a 19 inch tv out of and if you ask me again Im going to scream!
These things are going to be bad stuff. Just think, they might write games to these discs. Then we will have a war on our hands.
DRACO-
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
You know, not simply to be controversial, but I don't understand the big problem a lot of people here seem to have with this idea. People are comparing this to DivX (evil). This is *not* DivX, not even close. DivX required special hardware. DivX required that the user give over their credit card info and hook the player up to a phone line. DivX required the user to live with the fact that someone, somewhere, was recording everything they watched on their DivX player. This is not DivX.
What this is, however, is a pretty revolutionary idea for the world of video rental and I'm suprised more people aren't seeing this. This, if successful, has the full potential to completely change the way people rent movies. Suddenly, with this technology, any retail outlet has the full fredom of becoming a video-rental store, without any of the additional overhead involved of tracking discs, late returns, lost/damaged media, collection agencies, etc. Instead, any convenience store owner can go down to Costco and pick up a box of movies, rip open the top, and set the box on the counter next to the cheap lighters, beef jerky, and plastic roses. Consider that. How do you think this is going to affect rental chains like Blockbuster if every grocery store stocks the latest movie releases in the impulse-buy section of checkout lines, between the tabloids and the candy bars? It won't completely kill video rental stores, to be sure, because there still needs to be a place to non new-release movies, but it will take a chunk of their pie.
Additionally, this promises to change the whole distribution method for existing video rental stores. Previously, when a new movie was about to be released, discs and vhs tapes would go on the market to rental outlets for an extreme price of like $80 a pop, and this is how the publishers would make a good chunk of money off of the rental market. Only after the rental outlets have had a chance to get the latest-greatest movies, would they go on the market to the general consumer at a more normal price. This technology allows publishers to do away with that step, and release new movies to rental and consumer markets simultaneously. Of course, how many people are going to go to a video rental store to rent the latest and greatest when they can get it in the checkout line of "Safeway" remains to be seen. But the argument remains that, on the distribution side for movie rentals, this technology would simplify things immensly.
Some people point out that with this technology, you could by the disc, take it home, and rip it to make a copy. Sure, but couldn't you do that already with rental discs from a video store? Nothing has changed there. There are no new copyprotection mechanisms introduced with this tech. All the same all circumventable copy protection techniques still apply. If you want to pirate, you still have just as many options as you had before. In fact, this tech gives you a new one cause, unlike with traditional rental media, shop owerns aren't going to be so paranoid about people shoplifing movies.
The one significant concern that I've heard and I completely agree with is the environmental issue. Yes, this further advances the disposable society by giving us one more thing to clog our landfills with. Is it a huge issue? I don't think so. We throw more material away when we toss out an empty full sized bag of doritos. However, there is a certain "save gas/polution cause people don't have to take it back to the store" factor.. tho I'm not sure how much I'd trust the little environmentalist's report on how significant a savings that would be.
Anyways, I could go on but this is long enough. In short, this isn't the next frontier of evil in the media universe. It might even be useful.
The United States, a disposable nation. We build our lives around the convenience of Dixie cups, Saran Wrap, dime store paper plates, a Ziploc bags.
Now, disposable movies. Like we needed one more thing for the landfill?
CSS encryption + these two companies = more AOL cds
Waste products.
As Nancy Reagan was once said, "Just Say No!" :)
Exactly. For those of us with the kit to copy this is great, but we are not the target.
;-)
Blockbuster want these more than life itself. They can finally forget about dealing with returns - and always have inventory as they don't have to play the averages game. Just order a stack of disks and send them out.
It IS wasteful, not only do we have 20 CDs falling out of every computer mag we buy - we'll have a DVD to bin every time we 'hire' a movie.
This has to be weighed against the real waste of returning to the shop with the watched tape, all the time and effort involved in dealing with the returns process etc... Its still a bigger waste, but probably not by much.
The masses (and I dont mean that in a condescending manner) will love this.
"you mean I don't have to go back to the shop with the disk!! bingo!"
This technology is actually coming on line slower than I expected. Give the consumer what he wants. He wants movies to watch once, cheaply, when he wants it, with minimal hassle. This is a better option currently than movie on demand over a bit of wire.
Another benefit is that Blockbuser after Blockbuser will close as people get used to ordering films like pizzas. I can run to three video shops while holding my breath from my front door - bet thats down to 1 within a year of this hitting the street.
Maybe they'll fill those empty shops with coffee shops!
on the contrary. buying a one time DVD is not at all like renting or pay-per-viewing.
pay per view is conducted entirely fFrom the comfort of my house. all i have to do is (depending on my provider) make a phone call, or switch to the desired PPV channel and hit 'select' it requires little to no planning, and creates no effort on anyones part. in effect, it is pure money fFor the cable company, and simple entertainment fFor me.
renting a movie meanwhile allows me to view a movie a dozen times over a weekend. or at least replay a specific scene i might have missed while the phone rang or whatever. call me spoiled, but i absolutely love replaying cool/weird/important/packed scenes.
single use CDs are a stupid stupid idea, because they contain all the inconvenience of renting a movie, with all the inconvenience of PPV.
(this is not a troll)
Yeah, yeah, that $7 is for the Cindy Crawford vehicle Fair Game, but maybe good DVD's will drop in price like that, and at least you didn't pay to see it in the theatre.
-sk
I don't know about anybody else, but when I signed up for the "Future" and this digital revolution, it was partly so that all non-physical art; literature, music and film, would be publicly accessible, for free, from a discreet and tastefully designed computer consul. --Preferably on a spacious and graceful starship.
The entire Star Trek universe was/is a weird Freudian hallucination wherein all the races are rarified aspects of our current selves.
This idea of taking something purely digital, something which is reproducible with no threat of waste or effort, and tying it to a wasteful, laborious and greedy method of storage and distribution is so bloody Ferengi, it makes me retch.
The flowers of humanity are not shared openly, but dangled like carrots in an infantile effort to 'get something'. How ugly and foolish!
We're a bunch of silly hobbits, squabbling over Bilbo's estate gifts, getting the name tags lost and digging holes in his basement.
Hooray for us.
I can't wait to start ripping off the media giants and distributing their crap for free to anybody who asks. Too bad most of it is unwatchable. --Though I suppose it'll make stealing it less time consuming in that I won't actually have to view any of it. . .
-Fantastic Lad
For this to be worthwhile for them they must have good copy protection. However, copy protection is an impossibility.
The goal of copy protection is to create something that copies perfectly to a display device but fails to copy to a recording device. Simply creating a recording device that more perfectly emulates the display device and the signal is copyable.
Copy protection screws things up. That is how macrovision works. They screw up the signal coming out of the vcr so that recording devices with certain circuits will not record a good picture, then they lobby congress to make it illegal to produce a vcr without those circuits. (We pay the congress to work for Macrovision, what kind of a scam is that?)
DVDs don't have copy protection. If you copy an encrypted DVD you still have all the data that was on the original. Region codes and encryption (encryption is maybe too strong a word for what they do) do nothing except for make you life difficult when you are trying to read the DVD. Region codes mean that in order to watch movies you purchased you may have to buy up to seven DVD players (or 1 code-free DVD player) although it is likely that most of your movies will be from your home region.
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