How many times do you need to make the same mistake before you learn?
Disney today officially scrapped it's EZ-D disposable DVD project after (surprisingly) it didn't take off. Quite why people wouldn't buy $5 DVDs that only played for 48 hours seems to be a mystery to Disney. Apparently, they didn't speak to Circuit City after its failed attempt to do a similar thing with DiVX, where you bought the DVD at full price but then had to pay a subscription to actually play it. And then only on specially-equipped players.
So now both Disney and Circuit City have learned the same lesson - people won't buy DVDs that they can't play freely. That is, after all, the concept of "fair use". And when you buy a DVD you don't expect to have to keep paying for it, or have it just stop working after a couple of days.
But these things tend to come in 3's. So one more company is bound to have a stab at a similar project. We don't know who yet, but it's likely to be some entrepreneurial bunch. Let's see. They'll decide that we all want cheap DVDs. They'll decide that disposable doesn't work, and licensing doesn't work. Hmm. I guess the most asinine option left is bound to be the one they pick. That would be to sell us blank DVDs with some form of special encryption on them that only allows one specific data type to be burned on to it. Then we have to download the movie in a proprietary data format and burn it ourselves using their proprietary software. Then it will only play on hardware enabled with their proprietary hardware or software lock. Yeah. That's the ticket. Go get 'em tiger.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will just keep buying regular DVDs that we can play forever in any player.
So now both Disney and Circuit City have learned the same lesson - people won't buy DVDs that they can't play freely. That is, after all, the concept of "fair use". And when you buy a DVD you don't expect to have to keep paying for it, or have it just stop working after a couple of days.
But these things tend to come in 3's. So one more company is bound to have a stab at a similar project. We don't know who yet, but it's likely to be some entrepreneurial bunch. Let's see. They'll decide that we all want cheap DVDs. They'll decide that disposable doesn't work, and licensing doesn't work. Hmm. I guess the most asinine option left is bound to be the one they pick. That would be to sell us blank DVDs with some form of special encryption on them that only allows one specific data type to be burned on to it. Then we have to download the movie in a proprietary data format and burn it ourselves using their proprietary software. Then it will only play on hardware enabled with their proprietary hardware or software lock. Yeah. That's the ticket. Go get 'em tiger.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will just keep buying regular DVDs that we can play forever in any player.
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