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

Absolutely Stupid!

[CommanderData]

That's just great. Lets overflow landfill after landfill with disposable view-once or twice DVDs, and use up those fossil fuel supplies even faster making these disposable frisbees. Oh yeah, while we're at it, lets gouge the customer's wallets more on regular DVDs that don't self destruct...

The combinatiom of these things does nothing to stop piracy, it may even increase it. You could rent one of these and copy it in the first 8 hours to a regular DVD-R and enjoy it forever.

Re:Absolutely Stupid!

[a24061]

You can only recycle something if there's a facility near you that handles it. If you drive out of your way to recycle your DVDs, you're doing more harm than good.

Recycling still consumes energy and resources and produces pollution---just at a lower level than manufacturing from scratch. Manufacturing durable goods is better than manufacturing recyclable disposable goods.

Re:Absolutely Stupid!

[Houn]

On another note, how exactly are the studios going to convince the major rental houses (Blockbuster, Hollywood video) that this is a GOOD thing for them? Even if the disks are sold to them for PENNIES, they are automatically losing:

1. Rental Length (Most rentals are like, 5 days now?)
2. Charging for unreterned rentals.
3. Sales of previously viewed movies.

I'll admit, I'm no expert on the economics of running a major rental chain, but this can't possibly be viewed as a positive thing by them... I mean really, what ADVANTAGE do they get? If I ran Blockbuster, I'd see it as the thinly-veiled attempt to screw me that it is, and reject it on that simple fact.

But, I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one...

It's Sad.

[Gigahertz]

It's sad that most consumers won't 'get it'.... The disposable DVD costs more to make, has the same data on it, and costs 25% the cost of a normal dvd.... which is identical without the degrading chemicals...

I heard about the first degrading disk a long time ago, and I really see it as THE WORST invention in many years.... It's a horrible product for consumers, and a clear example of many things that are horribly wrong with companies today.

Take it easy...

[Pendersempai]

Calm down, guys. They've tried self-destructing DVDs before and they didn't sell then either.

Remember, the technology has only been developed. The movie studios haven't bought in yet. And if they do, it'll only be a financial disaster for them.

Blockbuster will never go for this

[optimus2861]

Forget selling to the public; the studios will never be able to sell these to the rental chains. As it stands now, Blockbuster buys, say, 30 copies of a DVD per location, rents each copy out, oh, 100 or so times, then can resell the copies as they get used and no longer need to carry as many in stock. Easy.

Now the studios expect Blockbuster to carry 3000 copies per location to get that same number of rentals? Or order 30 copies per week, every week, for the same time period?

Shyeah, right. Blockbuster's a big enough corporation that they won't hesitate to tell the studios to get stuffed on this.

Disposable DVDS solution.

[pklong]

All you need to do is take the thing back the next day and demand a refund.

Say that when you tried to play it the DVD was already dead. How can they prove the air seal hadn't failed already or the disk was faulty due to a manufacturing defect.

Philip

Re:And -- duh -- there's no market for it anyway

[TheRaven64]

For the screener problem, this would introduce a nuisance copy protection measure. (Note to industry; have those ever done anything to prevent copying?)

There is only one way to make copy protection work:

Make the amount of effort required to bypass the copy protection greater than the gain.

Since there are people who regard breaking copy protection as an interesting challenge, the difficulty in bypassing copy protection for a consumer is usually about as difficult as a visit to google. Apple seem to have this right at the moment with iTMS (I've bought a few albums from it. I could remove the copy protection, but since I can listen to them on 5 computers, my iPod or burn to CD already I wouldn't gain anything.) I hope the rest of the industry learns from this (they probably won't, but I can hope).

Backwards

[PMuse]

...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 ... 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, ...

You may want to loosen that tin-foil hat a little--it's cutting off more than just the spy-waves.

What self-degrading DVDs do is allow a whole bunch of retailers (Walmart, Target, gas-stations, etc.) to sell 1 viewing of a movie. That's a new product for them. That allows them to hit the $8 pricepoint for single viewings and the $30 pricepoint for durable DVDs. It's not like the durable retail DVDs we have now are going away any time soon. (All of which is bad for consumers, of course.)

Current rental shops, BTW, should _hate_ degradable DVDs. First, they cost more per sale than rerentable durable DVDs. Second, rental shops _love_ late fees, which degradables don't have. Third, rental shops love returns because it causes people to go to their store. Fourth, degradables allow big-box retailers to enter the rental shops' price range, eating their business.