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DVDs Are Movies On Demand
from the just-not-the-way-you-thought dept
Thomas Stewart's latest column for Business 2.0 talks about the hazards of trying to predict the future. For years people have been talking about how big "movies on demand" were going to be. What they didn't realize, according to Stewart was that those movies would come on DVDs. Instead lots of people burnt lots of money trying to build complex, expensive video on demand systems that no one ever wanted. Of course, it's not clear the movie industry gets that yet. In the same issue of Business 2.0 there's another article talking about the latest attempt to offer movies on PCs (which we made fun of yesterday). The writer wonders why he would ever pay $4 to slowly download a movie that was only good for one day and only viewable on a tiny computer monitor, when he could just rent the DVD at Blockbuster instead.
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Tried and failed
Anyone remember DivX -- not the AVI competitor -- the $4 DVD's that only played in a special player and expired 24 hours after you started them. No one wanted it (and I do mean **no one**) and it went down the crapper. If I didn't want it then, why would I want it now?
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Re: Tried and failed
One feature of the Divx system was that the window in which you had to watch the movie did not start when you got the disc from the store but rather when you first started to watch it. Thus you could get a bunch of discs at once and watch them over a week or two and not need to match repeated trips to the video store.
Now things like Netflixx offer some of this ability, but I don't thing a properly done Divx like system is purely evil.
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