TIL Circuit City created a proprietary disposable type of DVD called a DIVX that was viewable for only 48 hours after initial viewing unless an additional fee was paid. Which led to bankruptcy
DIVX - Wikipedia
I remember it very well. You also needed a special player to play them, which only Circuit City sold. It was all cheaper than DVDs and DVD players, but obviously only if you watched it once or twice. And it was more expensive than renting it at Blockbuster.
Just a stupid idea.
Ironically the “viewable for 48 hours” is now the model for renting streamed movies using a special device. They were ahead of their time.
Hopefully all these things follow the same path. Bankruptcy. Like their morals.
It’s not that ironic.
Renting used to exist, and it required you to have a dvd or vhs player. Renting on streaming doesn’t require a ‘special device.’ In fact it is the least special device needed by comparison, as you can watch on so many different devices.
48 hours was pretty common on new release rentals too, if not even less time.
Imagine if instead you needed to buy another tablet that only functioned as a video rental device. And nothing else could watch the rentals. That would be closer to reality.
I remember DirecTV in the late 90s used this model. When you wanted to watch a pay-per-view, you had access to a channel that was streaming broadcasting it for 24 or 48 hours.
I'd say less stupid and more shortsighted. If the cost of DVDs were to have stayed high for, say, 10+ years, then I could see getting a user base for DIVX and having at least moderate success.
But a giant tech retailer of all things should be aware that new tech tends not to stay prohibitively expensive for too long.
ITT: people confusing DIVX with DivX
Pffft DivX, real G's use XviD!
Movie.Title[2009]DvDrip-aXXo
I knew there'd been some kind of thing with the same name as the open source(ish?) DivX video codec, but not living in the USA I never found out what exactly it was.
I'm actually surprised no one got sued for trademark infringement. Two video-related products having such similar names.
DIVX flopped hard and was gone within a year. DivX was just mocking them afterwards.
Circuit City’s downfall was due to a lot more than just a DVD player that didn’t sell well.
They also had famously bad customer service and made a lot of other very strange decisions about what products they would and would not carry.
When BestBuy started to take their market share, they had stores that were notcsurrounded in vultures and they actually sold dishwashers and whatnot.
Circuit City was run by a bunch of people who thought they could punch a penny here and there to optimize revenue, and they optimized themselves into become stores had terrible products and people.
They were on commission. I had a friend selling plasma televisions when they first came out and sold warranties as including fuel refills. Ya know because you need to refill the plasma just call us when the television displays the reminder.
Holy crap man. There's no way someone didn't complain. He never mentioned getting caught. Made a killing while he was there.
They also had famously bad customer service and made a lot of other very strange decisions about what products they would and would not carry.
But but the jingle said 'Service was state of the art'
They were WAY ahead of their time, clearly.
Circuit City was circling the drain by the mid 90s
I distinctly remember my last time in a Circuit City. I don't recall the date, but I'm going to say it was circa 2006. I had purchased a Nintendo Wii at one of CC's competitors but the competitor did not have any suitable Game Cube controllers. So I went over to Circuit City to see what they had since they were essentially in the same shopping complex. In a surprising turn of events, they actually did have Game Cube controllers in stock, they had the style/brand I was hoping for, and the price was actually reasonable.
They had dozens of employees out in the various sections of the store, at least one per department. There were a plethora of customers. However, they had literally 1 cash register open. The line was backed up into the aisles. I am pretty sure I waited 45 minutes just to check out with this one single item, and that's only because the customer service manager came over after about 40 minutes and offered to check out anybody with only 1 or 2 items.
Might be a complete surprise to the former corporate overlords, but for some odd reason I decided never to go back after that.
Circuit City had a rough transition out of the 90s. For a while they were pretty highly-regarded because they had salesmen who actually knew their shit. They had specialization of skills within the store, so the sales experience was excellent.
But with the rise of internet sales, mega-store's like Frys, and Best Buy going to the Walmart model, they couldn't keep up that level of service while being price competitive. Some stores really tried to keep the service excellent, but they did it by cutting back on things like maintenance and checkout staff, so you had some stores that were filthy and took forever to check out, but had full staffing in the sales departments.
But in the end their salespeople weren't enough to keep them alive. Especially when you could learn what you needed from them, then go to the next strip mall down the road and buy the products at Best Buy for 20% less.
I miss Fry's. I need to go to my local microcenter.
My last time there I was trying to buy a GPS for someone. I walked up to the counter and saw the GPS I wanted. I couldn't get either of the people behind that counter to sell it too me. They were pushing something else and simply wouldn't sell it to me. I went to best buy and purchased it. A few years later they were done.
lets make a reusable item single use, cuz landfills won't top themselves
Even worse, there was a special "rental" DVD meant for sales in gas stations and convenience stores that didn't require a special player like this one, but it literally would degrade and become unplayable after you opened it. And that's how they controlled the rental period. So unlike this DRM scheme, it would literally be unusable garbage.
The amount of brain power and inginuity wasted on bullshit like this is so sad. Corporations once they get big enough all turn into evil pieces of shit.
Technology Connections has a video on those.
It was reusable. The idea was basically the current iTunes model (rent for two days or buy forever) except with abstracting the license from the data since internet speeds weren’t fast enough to stream video.
So you’d “buy” or “rent” the license to watch the disc. Once your rental was up, you could give the disc to a friend who could buy or rent it. The idea was to basically use sneakernet to handle the heavy lifting and the internet just for license/DRM purposes.
Considering people today are willing to pay $10 to “own” a movie that’s on some server they will never see, it really wasn’t a terrible idea. Especially since the licenses were stored on the hardware, so your movies would continue to play even if the server shut down. It’s just separating content from rights management is a really abstract concept and they didn’t do a good job explaining it.
See also: people getting upset about day1 DLC being included on the game disc, but have no issue buying a digital download.
And people forget that Netflix's original model was also sneakernet. Before streaming was viable they would physically mail you a DVD, which when you were done with you had to drop off someplace or physically mail back. The difference with Netflix was that if you didn't give the disk back they'd whack you for a (rather inflated, as I recall) purchase price for the movie. DIVX would just disable your ability to play it until you coughed up, obviating the need for a return trip for the disk.
To be fair, it was reusable, you just had to pay to use it again.
Unfortunately it relied on dial up internet, cause home broadband was pretty rare back then.
This reminds me of Flexplay, which was a DVD that had a coating which made the disk unreadable after 48 hours. Technology Connections did a wonderful video about it.
Could you just hit them with clearcoat right out of the gate?
These disks were designed to self-destruct in the presence of oxygen. They literally rust away.
Oxygen and its O2 form does like to sneak into everything. Even sealed in the original packaging, there's a limited shelf life. Flexplay claimed stability of only one year, which isn't much given it comes sealed in a plastic bag.
It's (the formats) downfall was thinking these companies could charge twice the price of a normal DVD player to consumers, just so the consumers could rent a DVD and not have to return it. That, coupled with the younger crowd not having a working phone line in their house by 1998, as cell phones started taking over.
God, imagine the piles and piles of garbage dvd's that would have been thrown away if this had taken over normal rentals.
To the curious: Redbox kiosks popped up around 4 years later in 2002.
twice the price of a normal DVD player to consumers
$500 was the standard rate for a player in '98. Maybe a little cheaper. But why bother buying a marginally smaller newer version of Laserdisc if the discs themselves evaporate?
Technology connections did a video about something related: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ccneE_gkSAs
Great video!
Penny Arcade had a character that was a DivX player they bought, that grew arms and legs and started walking around the apartment fucking things up and insulting the other characters.
This is a fun watch
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Or4nWQpidk
A very fun watch
Edit: that makes it sound suspicious. It's a divx sales training tape.
"What if DIVX goes bankrupt?”
"Well, its almost impossible to believe that DIVX could go under!"
Well that aged poorly.
I was mistaken because I thought Circuit City's downfall was a Bain Capital joint, but they were just run by a different set of idiots Circuit City
In August 2008, the chain's head office demanded stores destroy all copies of an issue of Mad magazine which described "Sucker City" as a chain with a long list of locations, all in proximity to each other and each adjacent to a rival Best Buy store.[45]
Initially, only a single Zenith player was available starting at $499, along with 20 to 50 titles. Very few players sold during this time period, with The Good Guys chain alleging that fewer than 10 players were sold during this time period.
This seems to be the fundamental flaw in the plan. If the DVDs just faded over time, but were system agnostic, they likely could have worked as a distribution scheme. But who is going to go $500 out of pocket (in '98 no less, so closer to $1000 today) for a player that eats your discs after two days?
I guess it's actually worse for Circuit City that I've never even heard of this. Like doing evil things is bad doing evil things and still being beneath our notice is probably worse for a company.
Some of us remember when this happened, and most folks either ignored or actively hated the idea.
The PA divx player became a recurring character I thought, I'm surprised searching their site only comes up with three comics.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/archive/search?tag=86&sort=old
The first one (IIRC and according to the search)
What's hilarious is that divx was the most popular pirate format back in the day before they went commercial use and xvid replaced it.
I think that was deliberate, and some pirate cheekily named the file format after a hated junk DVD format
Yeah I remember it being called "DivX ;)" so DivX with a wink.
Ah the good old days when mplayer was needed to handle the partially corrupt divx files on 800mb CD-Rs with missing I-frames, and audio sync issues right and left.
Is Don_Dickle the gallowboob of Lemmy? Been seeing them everywhere
Fucked around, found out.
Consumer hatred works.
People could have dumped Netflix and all this other shit and forced better products...
Gradual enshittification is the only way to launch a product now.
You gotta launch a product that's good. Better than the existing competition. But this happens with some serious seed money or angel investor. Essentially, some naive rich dude.
But eventually it needs to make a profit.
They know that eventually the product will have to be as bad or worse than what's already around...but they will have to boil the frog or else people will jump immediately as soon as the next thing comes around.
That gives the founders plenty of time to enshittify and bail before it turns to complete crap.
I remember this. I absolutely hated the DIVX format, and was rooting for it to die.
IIRC, they were just normal DVDs, with a layer which would gradually become opaque after exposure to air, turning them into garbage.
That was an entirely separate disposable rental DVD company
At the same time, nearly everything on PCs was watched with DivX, which made things annoyingly confusing
Divx was a video codec and much better than the others at that time. It was super confusing when Circuit City announced their DIVX program.
Yeah DivX was awesome. Really led the way in allowing videos to be shared online. I wouldn't have seen half the anime I did if it wasn't for it.
OK I knew something sounded wrong about this but couldn't remember what
Guys, check out my new video streaming site that has a bunch more restrictions than you'd expect. It's called yOuTuBE. What do you mean "that's confusing"?
All this talk of DivX, but no mention of (the open source alternative) XviD? Maybe people confuse them. I think I had way more XviD videos at the time.
I just now realized that XviD was DivX backwards.
Back in the day, I never knew the difference between the two, I just saw DivX getting gradually replaced by XviD.