DIVX dies
from the we-hardly-knew-ye dept
Todd writes “Circuit City is killing DIVX, citing inadequate studio and retailer support. Though this personally saddens me, it doesn’t surprise me. Expect Circuit City’s stock to tank on this announcement, btw… “ Considering Todd is the only person I’ve ever known who was madly in love with Divx, I’m not so sure the stock will tank. I think most people might be happy with the news. People seem to have an irrational fear of Divx.
Comments on “DIVX dies”
Market reaction
Though I’d be rich if I could accurately predict the market, I was assuming that the market would re-price the bump they’d given CC in March. To quote the CNET article “Also, in March, shares of Circuit City rose more than 12 percent due to positive speculation about the future of Divx and the expectation that more companies would invest in it.”
I couldn’t hope to educate consumers on why DIVX was never a threat to DVD, because so many people just don’t get it. Hating DIVX as a “different” format seemed akin to hating cassette tapes in favor of CDs; both formats offer a tradeoff of convenience and quality. Most people didn’t accept the convenience of DIVX as superior and thought that their DVD players would be obsolete if they didn’t publically espouse hatred of this other format.
Lastly, I’m surprised (and not surprised!) that CC didn’t decide to sell DIVX discs only over the web. Their site had made great strides, allowing you to forward-buy titles and getting them shipped in anticipation of release date. Granted, they had a continuous backlog of “titles” to “wrap” (sound familiar, Mike & Prash), but they were making progress there, too. At least they could have lowered costs sufficiently to make it more profitable for the time being.
Oh well
Re: Market reaction
I couldn’t hope to educate consumers on why DIVX was never a threat to DVD, because so many people just don’t get it.
Add me to the list of people who didn’t “get it”. I’ve been trying to see the point of DIVX but the only selling point it seemed to offer was lower price.
DVDs are currently marketed as an archival or value added for of movie storage and hence gets away with charging high prices. DIVX doesn’t seem to offer any increase in convenience (in fact, I consider it much less convenient) and as noted, movie buffs are generally willing to pay for the (debatable) higher quality of DVDs. DIVX would have very soon been replaced by true video on demand in any case.
Good riddance!
Sorry, Todd, but I felt that DIVX was an amazingly bad idea. Imagine, a digital video recording media with MORE annoying built-in limitations than DVD!
I mean, it’s bad enough to have to get the Macrovision and regional lockouts disabled at the point of purchase, but now you have to worry about getting billed every time you play the stupid disc. Even after you “buy” the disc, you can get billed playing it at your friend’s house. That’s way more inconvenient than returning the disc to the rental store was in the first place.
It’s a shame for people that bought lots of discs, though. Hope you can get your player modded once the two years is up.