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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to put them in a plastic baggie, push all the air out, then stick it in the freezer. It seemed to halt the process long enough to give it to a friend and allow them watch it after the 48 hour period.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.