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In Stores Soon: Perishable DVDs
Makarand writes "Technology that renders optical media useless after a short lifespan will soon find its way into stores
in the form of perishable DVDs. Retailers in the Southern United States will soon start giving a sample DVD to buyers of a CD (by Nappy Roots, a hip-hop group). This promotional DVD from Atlantic Records will work for only 8 hours. This promotion is aimed at finding if music fans would be interested in buying a package with both audio and video instead of just plain audio. A special dye sandwiched between the layers of the DVD will interact with air making it opaque and unreadable later. If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future." We noted this 2.5 years ago.
Silly git. You're ignoring the cost of taking the DVD back to the shop. If you have to drive even a mile, it's better for the environment to landfill the DVD.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
DIVX! Think about the waste. "If this media catches on you may not have to return your DVD rentals in the future." The rental chains business model is based upon you not returning them on time. So why would they go for this idea? and Where do you think that get there money from?
if the air can't reach the dye in between, I guess the cd stays readable, no ?
a just a thought.
rkoot
I'm not as think as you drunk I am
Is it hermetically sealed? What is its shelf life if it isnt't opened? I recycle my AOL CDs as Christmas tree ornaments. Tis the season!
This is a pathetic excuse - rarely do people jump in their car and JUST take a DVD back to the shop without doing anything else (shopping etc). Much of the time a person returning a DVD will hire another anyway, in which case they would have made the trip for that reason. This is all assuming they have to use a car in the first place.
Of course, you can try to argue that the sheer weight of the DVD will cause teh vehicle to use extra fuel I guess...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Actually, I wrote an e-mail to the company developing this when the story ran 2.5 years ago -- I'll quote the response in full (Yes, I'm a packrat):
Thank you for your comments. We have been sharing your frustration as the new reports have failed to report this product will be a recyclable. Just a drop the disc in the bucket next to the butter container and milk bottle. It also eliminates the car pollution of returning the movie to the store. avg. 10 miles and 1/3 gallon of gas.
We appreciate your concern.
SpectraDisc
I still think it's a stupid idea, but it's moved from monumentally stupid to moderately stupid.
This patent # :)))
6,161,106, was granted to Motorola, in 2000. While this depends on a magnetic method, it is interesting to know that the current referred method depends on interaction with air. How long before "mods" are made to have a drive enclosed in vacuum???
"Do something man. Right now."
Hmm, two years ago it was a light-sensitive coating that opacified after multiple playbacks.
They definitely won't have thought of that. What an ingenious idea.
You'd be surprised. When the first phonecards came out in the UK, (back before the dawn of time/widespread use of mobiles) it was discovered that if you coated the back of them with clear nail polish, then they wouldn't decrease in value...
I think I must have made about a hundred hours of phone calls until BT wised up...
And this could be way out there, but if the stuff reacts with air, couldn't you just spray the surface with some optically clear but non-air permeable gunk? This of course assumes said gunk exists, but I'm sure it does.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Let's see...
A DVD is 120mm in diameter and 1.2mm thick. That puts its volume at 1.2 * 60^2 * pi, or 13572 mm^3. That means that a DVD's volume is about 1/74000 of a cubic meter.
Assume that every American buys 10 disposable DVDs per year. That's 3 billion of these things that wind up in the landfill, for a total of around 41000 cubic meters.
Switching to American measurements, these would fit into a one-acre, 30 foot deep hole. There are plenty of places in the Nevada Desert where you could dig such a thing.
Or, think of it another way: If you threw away disks like this every time you rented a movie, by what percentage would it increase *your* personal trash output? For me it would be well under 1%.
On the other hand, assume that each DVD rental results in one extra mile of driving to return it. (Yes, I know you could walk, but the places I usually rent from are 4 and 9 miles away.) That results in an extra 3 billion miles of driving, or at least 100 million gallons of gasoline burned. Given that 1 gallon of gasoline results in 20 pounds of pollution (mostly CO2 and H2O), that's 1 million tons of pollution.
So: One acre hole in Nevada, or 1 million tons of pollution. Your choice.
Going from memory here.
The earlier use of this mentioned in the article used some weird dye that was on the surface of the disc. After the laser hit it, it started a slow process of becoming opaque, and in a few days it was unreadable. Some college students discovered that a product called "soap" mixed with a catalyst "water" removed the dye and made the CD readable again.
This uses a dye in the middle of the disc, between layers. If air can get in, why can't another solvent? Wouldn't the same technique be true of these discs as well as the previous attempt?
While the future of non-returnable DVDs is dead in my mind, I'm glad to see that the RIAA is finally looking into "value added", giving me a reason to buy the CD instead of download it.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
All this stuff about the rental stores is baloney; the real use for this technology is to make "renting" a movie an impulse purchase that can take place anywhere. Think about it:
What if you could pickup a brand new release while you're on your way through the checkout at the grocery store for something like $1? Maybe you're interested in watching the movie but not necessarily interested in owning it or maybe you just want to check it out to see if it's worth a buy; either way you'd pay a dollar to find out right?
I think the real goal as far as the movie studios are concerned is to get people like BlockBuster out of the way. If a really cheap disposable DVD might lead to a more expensive purchase (say a boxed set with extra goodies) then that's even better for the studios.
It's also not necessarily bad for consumers since you're potentially not risking much to check out if a movie is worth a purchase or not.
As far as piracy goes this could be a big winner for the studios also. What's the point of hassling with ripping a DVD that you might only watch one or twice if you can grab one for about the price of a candy bar when you stop for gas?
Surely a biodegradable plastic that would be suitable for making DVD substrates out of wouldn't be that difficult, surely? I think starch - based biodegradable plastics are in use for carrier bags at the moment, and if the dye breaks down on contact with air, that only leaves the label to break down
I can see the advertiser being FURIOUS if they paid a few million dollars to imprint, say, the newest BMW ad on the James Bond soundtrack, only to find that no consumers can view it because the plastic shrinkwrap failed to keep out enough air.
Why wait for nature to take it's course here? When these start shipping in the US, I'm going to the record shop with a needle!
0 1 - just my two bits
I was thinking about this, and I was wondering, which is more wasteful, a disposable DVD, or driving X miles round trip to and from the video store to return them. If you are going back to the store anyways it is no big deal but to just drop them off, it depends.
Actually, I was thinking of a submersible DVD player that had some relatively inert gas (Nitrogen, for instance) pumped into its case. You would open the package of the DVD under water and put it directly into the DVD player, which would also be submerged.
Infact, a submersible DVD player would go great with the TV player by the hot tub.
This is yet another glimps into the minds of the entertainment industry's marketing people. The holy grail is pay-per-use consumer products, which unfortunately is a concept that is fairly new in capitalism, especially in the United States where property laws reflect mostly tangible goods. This helps to explain why companies and consumers are having so many problems with each other.
Anyway, the distribution methods look somethin like this, from most desirable (and most profitable) to least:
Pay-per-Use - Require consumer to pay for each experience (i.e.: theater movies, pay-per-view, arcade games)
Subscription - if pay-per-use isn't possible, require the user to pay a recurring subscription fee for access to the material (i.e.: cable)
Media Ownership - if subscription isn't possible, sell the media in a permanent form to the consumer.
Media ownership is of course the most desired for the consumer. It allows them to experience themusic/movie/etc whenever they want, trade or sell it to friends, etc. Of course it's the least profitable for the industry.
The problem media companies are facing is that, as technology matures, it's allowing consumers to use the media in any way they want. For example, using a Tivo to turn subscription-distributed media into owned permemant media.
What we're seeing now is the entertainment industry scrambling to use laws that were originally enacted to protect companies from each other, and bend them to try and keep consumers from using the media for which it wasn't originally intended.
Here's a hypothetical situation: In 15 years medical science progresses to the point where they fix eyesight with little nano machines. In the process they also give people the ability to record what they watch and play it back (kind of like a Tivo built-in to your head). Thus turning everything you experience into the potential for permenant media. What do you think the entertainment industry will do then? Legislate congress to make all medical nano devices capible of recording motion images be part of a digital rights management royalty payment system, and likely called something along the lines of the Digital Medical Device Copyright Act. That's if the entertainment industry is still alive in the same for it is today, which I doubt.
_______
2B1ASK1
DVDs that only last 8 hours? But then I might miss that bonus blooper reel where Viggo Mortensen picks his nose during a break on the set of Fellowship of the Ring! Horrors!
Seriously, this won't fly because human beings have an infinite capacity for carelessness -- which Blockbuster has exploited to great success, I might ad. There are too many opportunities for something to go wrong here, not only on the part of the consumer, but the factory workers, the shippers, and the handlers at the grocery stores and mall CD chains where these DVDs will be marketed relentlessly. (Watch once and throw away! Only $4.99!) A couple batches of ruined airtight seals will turn retailers away from this idea in a hurry.
This idea is destined to go the way of the caribou. IMHO, that can't happen too quickly.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
But you have to add in the collection % of petrol used for waste collection and this may depend on how often you rent movies. I used to rent one a night because I worked nights and daytime tele was not geared towards me. So in the 3 years I worked nights that would have been an average of 700 of these in the rubbish but the video store was between my work and home relatively.
It all does depend so the question is will they give you a choice?
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Joe average will then say hey, I guess I can't. And proceed to watch it on his TV, and not copy (unless just to the VCR).
I'm realated to a Mr Joe Average. He bought a consumer DVD recorder for his television, and returned it to the store angrily when he realized he couldn't copy the DVDs he rented onto blank media.
Joe average may not know about how the technology works, but he's also not willing to pay for something that removes functionality that he's previously had with video tapes.
Similarly, my mother only listens to CDs on her headphones that are pluged into the CD-ROM drive of her computer at work. Guess who isn't going to be buying any copy protected CDs.
The copy protection battle will be won by Joe Average.
I doubt you'd need to go to that trouble. It's more likely that the disc reacts only with some particular component of the atmosphere (it's most likely that it would react with oxygen, since oxygen likes to react with stuff). Put your computer and the disc in a big box, flush it with nitrogen or carbon dioxide (dry ice would be easiest to handle...drop in a chunk and wait for it to sublimate), open the disc in the oxygen-free environment, and go to town. Since carbon dioxide is heavier than air, you wouldn't even need to close the box...just seal the cracks with tape so it doesn't leak out. You might want to put a cover on it once the disc is loaded up, though, so that air currents in the room don't find their way into the box and contaminate it.
(Hmm...does this mean dry ice will be outlawed by the DMCA as a "circumvention device?")
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Nope. Get a 10 gallon aquarium (they cost like $10-$20), and a tank of helium (the party-balloon filling small tanks, they cost as high as $40 but half that you get back when you return the tank, and one full tank lasts almost forever).
;-)
Put the wrapped DVD in the aquarium. Take two rubber gloves and some saran-wrap to effectively seal the top of the aquarium (make sure to use enough that putting on the gloves won't break the seal).
Tip the aquarium on its side, and peel away a small hole in one top and the opposite bottom corner.
Light a votive candle and place it in front of the lower hole.
Add helium, via the PVC tube that almost certainly came with the aquarium (if not, pay the $0.15/foot for a few feet), to the upper hole. Add it slowly, and when the candle goes out, keep adding for a few more seconds.
Voila! You now have a home-made, inert-gas, anhydrous glove box! Put your hands in the gloves, unwrap the DVD, and apply the clear nail polish to the edge. Oops, you *did* remember to put the nail polish in the aquarium before sealing it, right?
I had a chance to try a DVD video as part of a consumer test. /.'ers will find the last part really interesting. It was called EZ DVD, and, upon contact with air, would begin self destructing until, within 72 hours, it would be unreadable.
My wife came home from the mall with a package of materials for a consumer test EZ DVD. It was a copy of "Kate and Leopold" (they had others but that was the wife's choice-- oh boy!). The questinnaire included what we thought of the quality (poor- no chapter stops, pan and scan), how much we would pay (I put $3.95 but they had up to like $7) etc.
Here is the whack part: I put it in my DVD-ROM. It would not play back correctly nor would DVD-Decryptor rip it. I put it back in the DVD-V player and it worked fine (it was suppsed to last 72 hours before destruction and it had only been about 3 hours). I don't know if this was a test of a new anti-copy device or a side effect of the disc's construction. Mysterious. Has anyone else tested the disc's as well?
you'd prolly have to polish the fuck out of it so the laser can still focus..
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.