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Microsoft Invents A 'Play-Once Only' DVD
auckland map writes "Microsoft has developed a cheap, disposable pre-recorded DVD disc that consumers can play only once." From the article: " Buying an ordinary DVD of a new film costs between £15 (E22, $26.40) and £20. Microsoft's new disc will enable the studios to release a "play-once, then throw away" copy for as little as £3, much the same as renting a video or DVD. But unlike a rented DVD, the new disc allows consumers to decide when they watch films and there is no need to return it. The new generation of DVD disc will spearhead a fresh assault by Microsoft on the home-entertainment market." Update: 10/06 03:38 GMT by J : Kinda important to read the followup story.
So how environmentally friendly are these? If MS is going to be trying to put rental places out of business, do they have a plan for millions of now-useless single-play-DVDs and the associated packaging?
Let's say I had to stop/pause early to do something urgent. Would that count as one usage?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Watching this movie I just payed $4 to rent, power goes out (brown/blackout, or whatever). When the power comes back on... I can't play the movie anymore!
Or I'm part way through the movie that I just rented, and I have to leave the house for whatever reason, come back later to find out someone took the dvd I was watching out of the player because they wanted to watch something else. Now it won't play again.
I just see this being another headache for customers and customer support.
Its not what it is, its something else.
how can they get away with calling it a DVD?
It was called divx (not to be confused with divx) and was marketted by circuit city.
It failed miserably for a variety of reasons. First and foremost it was more expensive than consumers were willing to pay for something they got to 'keep'. It's a mindset problem - if you rent it, it must be returned, and is probably rentable because it's too expensive to purchase. If you buy it, regardless of the cost, then it's "property". They didn't want to market it as "disposable" or "consumable" which customers understand instantly, and it wasn't a rental. So it failed.
Microsoft is trying to give the mdeia companies something they used to have, and have wanted for years: a bigger slice of the rental market. I don't think it's really going to work out, though, unless they also raise the cost of the DVDs.
But what if they stopped making DVDs for sale. Waht if they went whole-sale to HD-DVD, charged $30 per disc, and also produced a "throw away" DVD that worked in any 'old' DVD player for $3-5. Of course, the rental companies will simply offer the HD-DVDs for $3-5 rental, but those customers who want to view the DVD version will be forced to "rent" it multiple times, or upgrade their equipment and either purchase expensive movies or rent them.
It's temporary. In no case can this type of disc ever really be marketable long term, and it can only work short term under special circumstances.
Of course, if it depends on a windows OS or codec with web access (which would allow multiple plays with purchase of additional keys) then it's going to fail out the door - there's no hardware for the average consumer, and no boxed disc is going to make it in the market unless the average consumer is going to buy into it.
Lastly, it would be a boon for pirates. If it plays once in a regular DVD player, then it can be ripped once.
-Adam
If I go to Blockbuster or my local video rental store, the movie I'm renting eventually goes back to the store, where they can rent it to the next guy for another few bucks. They stop renting that particular disc when it gets scratched or broken, but otherwise, it's a continuous revenue stream.
If video stores started sending home these self-destructing discs, they could only rent them once. Then they'd have to buy new copies from the manufacturer. Why would they choose to do this? The answer is, simply, they wouldn't.
I think you're missing the point. It's not that Microsoft is or is not stupid, it's that self-destructing DVDs have been made before, and flopped each time. They allowed the consumer to chose WHEN they watched it, but still only worked for a very short period of time, and were to be disposable as well. It didn't work not because it wasn't Microsoft, it didn't work becaus epeople didn't WANT it. The market said "no thanks". And frankly, MS is not the world's smartest company. They have good PR, and deep pockets with which they can engage in a war of attrition against their competitors to win with inferior products. The issue here is that if people don't buy disposable DVDs to start with, there's no market for MS to take over.
And I'll go ahead and be redundant here too. This is just ANOTHER case of MS taking someone else's idea, slapping the word "innovation" on it, and thrusting it out the door, and a few people think it'll fly THIS time because MS is behind it.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]