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Disney's Disposable DVDs Deemed Duds
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like disposable DVD's are headed the way of the dodo bird. Consumers (ahem, customers) in several markets are rejecting the $7 self destructing flexplay discs. Some stores have decided to stop selling. According to the stores, 'Customers aren't interested in paying more than $6 for a limited-play DVD when they can pay $2 at the video store. Even with a $2 late fee, it's cheaper than buying a disposable DVD.' and 'he hasn't seen one customer purchase an EZ-D, though some of them have been shoplifted out of the store.'"
After the DivX fiasco (the DVD-esque player, not the codec) and now this, maybe they'll start to listen. Customers want to buy and own their products, not rent or license them.
The cause of death on this idea seems rather simple to find... going rate for a movie that you get to watch once/twice then give back is $3-$4, and this came in at more than $6. Between this project and MovieBeam, Disney seems to be testing out every form of rental content distribution possible, but it seems like there's no such thing as one that works any better than the models that already exist. The Circuit City-backed Divx project should have been the first clue...
I'm glad. This kind of product simply shows a lack of respect for the consumer. Large corporations should all be putting the money into gaining consumer trust, rather than limiting consumer freedom.
If the MPAA were to combat shoplifting in the same way they combat file-trading, they would demand that consumers (ahem, customers) be made to wear lead helmets that would prevent them from being able to watch or listen to a movie unless they first invoked a key obtained when purchasing one of their products. Only then would you be able to remove this helmet, and then only for as long as they were watching that movie.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
It was a horrible idea from the beginning. If they were a buck then it might work but as long as titans like Wal-Mart keep DVDs cheap to buy, and Blockbuster keeps them cheap to rent they won't sell. Even my kiddos questions why we would want to buy something that we would just have to throw away! In our (U.S.) society of lazyness I am glad to see the environment won a round even though it was through a left hook (ie price NOT recyclability).
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Excellent news. This was just another attempt at impulse marketing by a faceless megacorp. "Hmm.. 'National Enquirer'.. 'Weekly World News'.. oh, 'Peter Pan!'" Now somewhere at Disney someone is getting thumbscrewed over "bad market studies" that suggested this would work.
You can only package shit so many ways before people smarten up and quit buying it.
Trolling is a art,
They shouldn't be more than 50% above regular rentals if even that much. So, if normal rentals are $2, they should be at most $3. Anyway, most people that want late fees will probably just use a service like Netflix.
Why would users want to pay more than three times as much for something with no actual increase in quality?
Hell, I was initially thinking that I could just copy these things with my DVDR before they turn black, but I can do that with rentals as well! There are some ideas I will never understand.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
One more "It's our property, and we don't trust you, the consumer, with it." from the big organizations has met consumers who are dissatisfied with their garbage and unwilling to pay for it.
Great!
And I hope the next time they try this it fails just as hard as this venture did. And eventually some executive will say, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe it's not worth alienating all our customers to squeeze an extra million out of our already 100 billion dollar profits."
Of course that executive will be ignored, and possibly fired for lack of vision. But it's a start.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Well, one of the rationales for disposible DVDs was to save people from going back to the shop. So, are these same people who can't/won't get back to the shop going to recycle them? Or drop them in the bin?
Now if we could just convince AOL to stop producing those throw-away CD's. There must be a large landfill somewhere with stacks and stacks of AOL (1000 hours of free access) CD's laying around. I'd rather pay a few bucks for some kind of video on demand service over the internet or cable. I'm not sure why anyone would want to buy a disposable movie.
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Wasn't it just a few years ago some cleaning product advertised "Just use and throw away." And got roasted over the poor attitude concerning the environment?
The "use and throw away" campaign is flawed. I don't think people want the so called convenience of disposeability. They just want convenience.
Its totally opposite the way of most major industries today. Which is only that way because of the pressure of customers.
Good old corporate greed. I just buy previewed DVDs from the local video store for $5-$10. They look just as good as the new ones unless someone scratched it in which case the store will take it back and replace it with another if they have one. I've bought 50 new and used DVDs over the past couple of years compared to 1 used CD I bought because I was on vacation and had nothing to listen to in a rental car. Take that RIAA. $18 for 45 minutes of music my ass..
And CDs were meant to be cheaper than LPs...
Production costs have very little to do with retail price. It's about how much the consumer is willing to pay.
Whoever led this experiment and set a price of $7 ought to get sacked. Children love to watch Disney films over and over again, and Disney should know that. This whole fiasco suggests they didn't.
The only disposable things that would work for Disney are nappies (diapers).
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Manny who bitch-gripe about the cost of a CD or renting a DVD are the same people who don't think twice about plunking down $2.50 - $3.50 for a cup of fancy coffee.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The fact that the disposable DVD was priced higher than conventional rental makes it a tough sell. Once again, the theory that consumers will pay a steep premium for minor convenience is proven wrong. Besides, I suspect the lack of a return means less foot traffic in the video store, and probably lower sales overall.
I wonder if it might have worked in a mail-order scenario. Getting rid of the turn process would be a big plus for companies like NetFlix. Any increase in the cost of media would be offset by a 50% reduction in the cost of postage.
Some reasons that Blockbuster is still in business:
1) There is still a "digital divide". Not everyone has or wants a computer with web access at home; unfortunately this is usually for financial reasons. Netflix is not a viable option for them.
2) People want to be able to pick up a movie on the way home from work on Friday night. They don't want to have to plan spontaneous movie night a week in advance (to account for shipping time).
3) New releases can be had the day of release at Blockbuster. With Netflix, you're lucky to get it a week later. Not a big deal for the patient, but some people want it ASAP.
4) Not everyone rents enough movies every month to make the $20 worthwhile.
I'm sure there are other reasons.
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Heck for $7-8 more (assuming it is on sale) you can buy the DVD outright and keep it forever. New, and not on sale, DVD's run around $20-25, which is cheaper than dragging a family of four to the movies. $7 for self destruction is indeed crap.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Before you only mod me funny (or worse), consider the importance of this issue as regards the new DRM protected CD's that have you register your disc in order to play it a limited number of times. Since there is no indicator on the CD itself showing how many plays it has accumulated, it this becomes common it will do much to destroy the secondhand/used CD market.
Not that the record companies will mind.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Netflix changes the way you rent movies. I used to be like you, but I'd get to the video store, and forget the ten movies that looked good when I saw the preview six months ago.
Now I just put movies on the Netflix queue whenever I see a decent preview. My queue is huge, and I'm constantly surprised by the DVD's in the mail. "Oh yeah...I wanted to see that."
It's fun.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
It's not just that they priced them way too high, but the movies they chose were neither good nor new. Let me get a decent new release for $5 and I may be interested in your "rental" system.
The last thing we need is another 'disposable' product. What 'disposable' actually means is planned obselesence which chokes land fills and the tax payer foots the bill, a hidden subsidy to the companies making disposable items.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I remember that, the lying bastards.
First it was that CDs were so expensive because there were only a couple of places pressing them. Once they got into full swing, the price would actually be lower.
Then the prices of LPs started rising... "well," they said, "we're not producing as many so it's costing more per unit."
Then both steadily increased until the basically stopped making vinyl altogether and CD prices never came down.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
At $4 they'd still be more expensive than renting from Blockbuster, but in-line with what people are willing to pay for the no-late-fees-ever rental experience through PPV. They'd have had a shot.
at more than double the 'renting from a store' rate they were guaranteeing failure.
It isn't hindsight whatsoever, it's price-sight. If they'd said '$7' when they were talking about the tech everyone would've told them it would bomb. But they kept saying 'for a little more than the price to rent a movie from blockbuster'. which made everyone assume $3-4.
$7 is certainly not 'a little more' than $3.
Perhaps the rental chains squeezed them to stratify the pricing intentionally, i don't know (Blockbuster may have appreciable pressure now that Disney isn't the only kids-content creator in the game).
I just know that at $7, they shouldn't have even bothered.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I didn't really appreciate the idea of the extra waste factor, but face it- we live in an extremely disposable world and I doubt one product would make a difference.
overall, I like the convenience the one time I tried it and found it to useful and assumed that once they were mass marketed the prices would become more reasonable.
That's what's wrong with the Americal psyche. Maybe 1 product doesn't make a difference. But what about this one product plus the AOL CDs plus the various other pieces of junk companies give out times the number of people who find no use for said junk. It adds up. Where does it go? Well invariably, you're not going to want it in your back yard. But it's got to go somewhere.
In any event, solutions don't come by people saying, "Oh the problem's too big. So we shouldn't fix it, but we should just add more fuel to the fire."
There's probably some catch I'm missing, but if you purchased one of these disks, then immediately copied it, as long as you retained your original (now unreadable) disk wouldn't your copy be legal? It was always my understanding that it was legal to make a backup copy of DVD's (hence products like DVDXCopy) provided you owned the originals. Since you own the original and it's no longer readable, your backup would be legal, right?
Just what we would have needed, more small round disks to put in our landfills.
Could you imagine the impact if this had really taken off? It would make the waste that AOL generates (Free AOL CDs) seem like nothing. I already throw out about 2 AOL disks a week. Imagine if the entire US was renting these DVDs instead of the reusable ones.