Yet Another Degrading DVD

Aire Libre writes "Efforts to eliminate price competition from cheap DVD rentals and used DVD sales appear to be speeding up. Flexplay Technology's EZ-D self-destructing DVD, which goes dark in a lagardly 48 hours, has been surpassed by a French DVD-D that goes dark in a speedy eight hours. Because neither technology has anything to do with piracy, they both appear marketed at movie studios that might wish to drive up the price of DVD rentals. Presumably, once throw-away DVDs catch on, the studios can for the first time prevent price competition between rental and sales of DVDs by charging more for a regular DVD (rentable and re-saleable) and having the retail sales copies disappear 8 hours after opening so that no one can re-sell them, lend them, rent them or give them to charity. This will also suppress competition from rentals and used copies against currently uncompetitive online movie downloads."

Comments

Re:Absolutely Stupid!

[Biotech9]

DVDs are manufactured with recyclable plastic. It's your fault if you buy this and don't recycle it. Only you can prevent forest fires.

DVDs are not recyclable, CDs and DVDs from the manufacturers that have been rejected are ground up for use as filler in building sites.

Here is a site that shows you how to reuses CDs/DVDs as a disco ball, or bird scarer...

Using old Abba CDs to make a disco ball has a certain justice to it.

Re:Absolutely Stupid!

[Gigahertz]

Haven't you heard?... Recycling is BULLSHIT. For the full story, watch Penn&Teller:Bullshit! on Showtime..... Recycling is the largest waste of time on the planet... ALUMINUM is the only product that is worth recycling, as it's cheaper to recycle aluminum than to mine it.... Every other recycled item, costs more, and also.... Landfills are not a problem, you can't FILL the landfill... ok?.... The garbage created by the USA for 1000 years could be stored in a 30 mile square box.

Re:Only 8 hours?

[FrenZon]

What happens when you want to get a dvd to watch the next day?

The self-destructing disks only start degrading when you either put it in your player (ie the laser causes the destruction), or take it out of its container and expose it to light/air.

Re:It's Sad.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

The 486 SX from Intel was a 486 DX with the FPU unit laser etched out. When you would buy the 487 "co processor" it was actually a 486 DX that would short out the original crippled chip.

So yes. Companies do spend a lot of time and effort making crippled products that cost them more to produce than the premium version. And they have been doing it for years.

Re:Probably redundant but...

[stecoop]

The DVD burner will be your best investment. As you probably know, Disney movies have 30 minutes of commercials up front and either you can wait until the startup gets to the point where you can actually hit play or you have to hid forward for 5 minutes to skip the commercials.

I would highly suggest you go get a DVD burner really soon, the prices of even a Dual Layer Burner are below a 100 bucks. You can then rip out all those commercials and simply insert the DVD and Walk away and it will play automatically. Download DVD Decrypted and DVD Shrink. You will never touch the originals again. The convenience of a movie playing when you insert the disk is the greatest thing for kids (no waiting no fussing you'll agree).

Re:Right

[squiggleslash]

I don't believe this for one second. Glass recycling schemes predate the whole green thing by decades. In the UK back when virtually every soft drink came in glass bottle form, virtually every bottle had a rebate available to people who returned the bottle. This was 20-30 years ago (and probably earlier, I'm only 32.) Milk deliveries used to pretty much insist your empty bottles be left on the doorstep, if you routinely didn't you'd be charged for their replacement.

Glass has always been an expensive business. Recycling glass bottles has been a money earner for decades.

I know people want to hate the green lobby because it does some daft things, but not everything the green lobby proposes is being done simply because the green lobby has proposed it. Sometimes it makes economic sense for businesses to act in a way that happens to be environmentally sound.

Whales do NOT eat algae

[Ronny Cook]

The final irony is whales and the rainforest, which people feel are somehow 'good'. People think the rainforest generates most of the oxygen in the air, but rainforests only produce something like 5% of it; most oxygen comes from algae in the sea. Who's eating the algae? That's right, the whales.

Whales do *not* eat algae.

Whales eat krill - small, shrimplike creatures. Krill eat algae. Less whales = more krill. More krill = *less* algae.

In tropical waters it's actually slightly more complicated; some tropical krill eat zooplankton as well as phytoplankton, which muddies the situation.

It's pretty much true about the paper. One thing that recycled paper does have going for it is that it's usually not bleached; production and use of chlorine is really nasty, environmentally speaking. But paper made from fast-growing plantation forests is very "good" for carbon levels. These forests do tend to leave behind rather acidic soils, which many plants don't like, and the forests themselves have terrible biodiversity ("green deserts")... but they do chew up that CO2.