Limited-Use DVD Technology 643
ps_inkling writes: "Two companies are creating different techniques to make DVD discs unusable after a set period of time. SpectraDisc has a patent on a limited-play DVD technology; FlexPlay is currently developing limited play DVD technology. The SpectraDisc technique is to coat the DVD with a film, then wrap the DVD in an anaerobic package.
The idea is to sell these 'play-once' DVD movies at a substantial discount to regular DVDs as a way to compete with pay-per-view or movie ticket outlets."
waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it.
The other shoe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Read-once - Copy-once? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought this had been done with DivX... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DivX (Score:4, Insightful)
I rent movies constantly, and buy those I like enough to watch again. If I could pick up a disc for $3-4 and not have to return it to the store, that could be extremely convenient. As long as I don't have to buy a special player, hook it up to my phone line, and shop only at Circuit City. That's why DivX failed, not because the concept was necessarily bad.
Re:Gotta love capitalism... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why Would I Buy This? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I just wanted to watch a movie once, I'd rent it from my local Blockbuster or similar video store. Those places carry DVDs now.
But if I buy a product, I damn well want to use it more than once! (Well, a data-carrying product, anyway. Food is a different story...)
I'm sure they could have tried to make VHS tapes, audio cassettes, and so on, that would only play once. Nobody was fool enough to try it until now.
I predict this thing will crash and burn at least as badly as DivX did.
Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
These new ideas are entirely different.. they rely on the disc itself to limit how many times you can play it. I, for one, wouldn't mind paying $1-2 for a DVD which allows me to watch a movie a couple times until the coating on the disk makes it unreadable. You only have to read it once to rip it.
Re:waste (Score:2, Insightful)
Will they be rippable? (Score:2, Insightful)
not really sure what this gains the studios.
Too much trash (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I thought this had been done with DivX... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be under the mpression that this technology is aimed at consumers. It's not. It's aimed at publishers. You will not have a choice of paying one dollar for a one-use disc and 10 dollars for a unlimited use disc. You will only have the choice of paying 10 dollars for a one-use disc.
Re:waste (Score:4, Insightful)
anyone think about the Environment? (Score:2, Insightful)
sigh. my brain hurts from corporate stupidity.
Do they want to compete with PPV? (Score:3, Insightful)
All I can see this doing is either removing the middleman between the movie company and the "unauthorized" copiers or flopping on its face when these kinds of people run into copy protection.
Shooting itself in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no way this can come to any good. Abort mission.
Re:I thought this had been done with DivX... (Score:5, Insightful)
Widespread paranoia over piracy is completely unfounded, the only example of an unprotected format, the CD, was wildly successful, while overly protected ones have failed miserably. I would even go so far as to attribute DVDs success to the cracking of its copy-protection.
The media industry now faces a choice, they can either listen to consumers and release unprotected, recordable, easy to use formats, or die, as consumers turn to other (possibly illegal) sources for the products they want.
This will increase piracy. (Score:4, Insightful)
I do the same thing with CD's now. I make a copy which I use, keep a copy on the hdd, and put the original into a safe spot. I've done the same thing with DVD's from time to time but not as much as the cases for DVD's seem to work better in my experience.
play once dvd + betty and joe customer = bad (Score:5, Insightful)
You will turn up with upset customers, fast.
I work at a walmart in the nortwest houston area. I can vouch for the fact that customers are not very quick at understanding things much less take the time to read anything. All they see is a Price, and an object they want. A while back we were stocking Jarassic part 3 in dvd. One full screen, one wide screen. Most customers dont have a clue there a difference and have a problem with the wide screen letter box format. Most of them come back and ask about full screen. They didnt see a little sliver of text at the bottom of the dvd that said wide screen.
Customers arent very bright when they come in stores. They will plow through water on the floor, spilled legos, anything. They never see signs higher than 6 foot, (never can find the 2 signs in the store both with 3 ft letters saying restrooms).
Customers seem to check their brains at the door and dont understand what Out of stock means and ask, "well, what does that mean?" Out of stock means out of stock, there is not a magic hat we can pull a 19 inch tv out of and if you ask me again Im going to scream!
These things are going to be bad stuff. Just think, they might write games to these discs. Then we will have a war on our hands.
DRACO-
Not a bad idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
What this is, however, is a pretty revolutionary idea for the world of video rental and I'm suprised more people aren't seeing this. This, if successful, has the full potential to completely change the way people rent movies. Suddenly, with this technology, any retail outlet has the full fredom of becoming a video-rental store, without any of the additional overhead involved of tracking discs, late returns, lost/damaged media, collection agencies, etc. Instead, any convenience store owner can go down to Costco and pick up a box of movies, rip open the top, and set the box on the counter next to the cheap lighters, beef jerky, and plastic roses. Consider that. How do you think this is going to affect rental chains like Blockbuster if every grocery store stocks the latest movie releases in the impulse-buy section of checkout lines, between the tabloids and the candy bars? It won't completely kill video rental stores, to be sure, because there still needs to be a place to non new-release movies, but it will take a chunk of their pie.
Additionally, this promises to change the whole distribution method for existing video rental stores. Previously, when a new movie was about to be released, discs and vhs tapes would go on the market to rental outlets for an extreme price of like $80 a pop, and this is how the publishers would make a good chunk of money off of the rental market. Only after the rental outlets have had a chance to get the latest-greatest movies, would they go on the market to the general consumer at a more normal price. This technology allows publishers to do away with that step, and release new movies to rental and consumer markets simultaneously. Of course, how many people are going to go to a video rental store to rent the latest and greatest when they can get it in the checkout line of "Safeway" remains to be seen. But the argument remains that, on the distribution side for movie rentals, this technology would simplify things immensly.
Some people point out that with this technology, you could by the disc, take it home, and rip it to make a copy. Sure, but couldn't you do that already with rental discs from a video store? Nothing has changed there. There are no new copyprotection mechanisms introduced with this tech. All the same all circumventable copy protection techniques still apply. If you want to pirate, you still have just as many options as you had before. In fact, this tech gives you a new one cause, unlike with traditional rental media, shop owerns aren't going to be so paranoid about people shoplifing movies.
The one significant concern that I've heard and I completely agree with is the environmental issue. Yes, this further advances the disposable society by giving us one more thing to clog our landfills with. Is it a huge issue? I don't think so. We throw more material away when we toss out an empty full sized bag of doritos. However, there is a certain "save gas/polution cause people don't have to take it back to the store" factor.. tho I'm not sure how much I'd trust the little environmentalist's report on how significant a savings that would be.
Anyways, I could go on but this is long enough. In short, this isn't the next frontier of evil in the media universe. It might even be useful.
Capitalism Beats Environmentalism once more (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States, a disposable nation. We build our lives around the convenience of Dixie cups, Saran Wrap, dime store paper plates, a Ziploc bags.
Now, disposable movies. Like we needed one more thing for the landfill?
CSS encryption + these two companies = more AOL cds
Waste products.
As Nancy Reagan was once said, "Just Say No!" :)
Re:DivX (Score:2, Insightful)
This idea sounds equally bad. Sure, they CLAIM to be competing with PPV and offering the disks at cheap prices, but I could envision a time where movie companies authorize these disks as a way to make you pay for the "rights" to watch the movie 10 times. More than that, tough, gotta pay again.
Terrible idea.
Re:Shooting itself in the foot (Score:4, Insightful)
Not much, on the surface. The first difference is that with the Blockbuster rental model, you know you can always go back and rent the disc again if you want to watch it at some later time, but don't want to completely buy it. To some people who skirt the edge between respecting the existing rules and breaking copyright, this can be a deciding factor. Admittedly, this would be a very small set of people, but why go through the hassle of copying a disc you can just rent again?
The FlexPlay/SpectraDisc systems remove this possibility. Part of what the backers of Divx envisioned was selling the discs in grocery stores and other non-rental outlets for impulse buyers. I think this is what Flex/Spectra are trying to do, so it's not as if you can return the disc once you're done with it. There was also a well-founded concern that certain studios, namely Disney, intended to release certain movies exclusively on Divx, preventing ownership and ensuring a permanent revenue stream. Should a movie get the permanent-rental-window treatment, there would almost certainly be a demand for copies that don't die after three days.
My point about burning may be nullfied by reality. One issue with consumer DVD burning technology is the single-layer nature of the formats; you can burn a single layer with a maximum capacity of either 4.7 or 3.95 GB, and that's about it. Many movies require two layers to fit. This holds for the rewritable specifications, AFAIK. Professional pressing machines are mad expensive, probably not even for the determined small-time pirate.
Of course, a mass influx of limited-use DVDs may create a push for a consumer-level writer that can produce multiple layers, though I don't think a writer that can fit in a computer case, or even a small room, is feasible on the consumer or prosumer level right now.
Re:One time? Pfft...easy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Blockbuster want these more than life itself. They can finally forget about dealing with returns - and always have inventory as they don't have to play the averages game. Just order a stack of disks and send them out.
It IS wasteful, not only do we have 20 CDs falling out of every computer mag we buy - we'll have a DVD to bin every time we 'hire' a movie.
This has to be weighed against the real waste of returning to the shop with the watched tape, all the time and effort involved in dealing with the returns process etc... Its still a bigger waste, but probably not by much.
The masses (and I dont mean that in a condescending manner) will love this.
"you mean I don't have to go back to the shop with the disk!! bingo!"
This technology is actually coming on line slower than I expected. Give the consumer what he wants. He wants movies to watch once, cheaply, when he wants it, with minimal hassle. This is a better option currently than movie on demand over a bit of wire.
Another benefit is that Blockbuser after Blockbuser will close as people get used to ordering films like pizzas. I can run to three video shops while holding my breath from my front door - bet thats down to 1 within a year of this hitting the street.
Maybe they'll fill those empty shops with coffee shops [geocities.com]!
Re:Gotta love capitalism... (Score:4, Insightful)
pay per view is conducted entirely fFrom the comfort of my house. all i have to do is (depending on my provider) make a phone call, or switch to the desired PPV channel and hit 'select' it requires little to no planning, and creates no effort on anyones part. in effect, it is pure money fFor the cable company, and simple entertainment fFor me.
renting a movie meanwhile allows me to view a movie a dozen times over a weekend. or at least replay a specific scene i might have missed while the phone rang or whatever. call me spoiled, but i absolutely love replaying cool/weird/important/packed scenes.
single use CDs are a stupid stupid idea, because they contain all the inconvenience of renting a movie, with all the inconvenience of PPV.
(this is not a troll)
Re:Gotta love capitalism... (Score:2, Insightful)
i predict the movie rental stores will all be closed within 5 years.
the profit model is good, but with the advent of widespread digital cable (and thus, very easy to access Pay-per-view), and with streaming media, tivo, and people's natural tendency to buy not rent
attempts such as single use DVD just arent going to be able to carry a dying market.
Tiny margins (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, yeah, that $7 is for the Cindy Crawford vehicle Fair Game [imdb.com], but maybe good DVD's will drop in price like that, and at least you didn't pay to see it in the theatre.
-sk
Another reason we'll never achieve 'Star Trek' (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about anybody else, but when I signed up for the "Future" and this digital revolution, it was partly so that all non-physical art; literature, music and film, would be publicly accessible, for free, from a discreet and tastefully designed computer consul. --Preferably on a spacious and graceful starship.
The entire Star Trek universe was/is a weird Freudian hallucination wherein all the races are rarified aspects of our current selves.
This idea of taking something purely digital, something which is reproducible with no threat of waste or effort, and tying it to a wasteful, laborious and greedy method of storage and distribution is so bloody Ferengi, it makes me retch.
The flowers of humanity are not shared openly, but dangled like carrots in an infantile effort to 'get something'. How ugly and foolish!
We're a bunch of silly hobbits, squabbling over Bilbo's estate gifts, getting the name tags lost and digging holes in his basement.
Hooray for us.
I can't wait to start ripping off the media giants and distributing their crap for free to anybody who asks. Too bad most of it is unwatchable. --Though I suppose it'll make stealing it less time consuming in that I won't actually have to view any of it. . .
-Fantastic Lad
a complementary technology.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the assumption of the system's infallibility is inaccurate, as evidenced by the history of such schemes, ie. DivX et al. The only difference is that this is a physical copy prevention.
For every DRM there is an equal, opposite and excellent crack
Recyclable? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does anyone know if there's anything recyclable in these cheap convenient plastic discs?
limited use tech: a modest proposal (Score:2, Insightful)
With that in mind, I'm quite amazed they just haven't totally run with this business concept of selling things that cease to work after x number of tries in the name of software and digital content copyright. Other industries should take note; let's not just stop at music and movies. We could make GIF and JPG images non-viewable after 10 views or so (the porn industry could make a killing!) We could make DVD players which stop playing and explode/disintegrate after 100 movies (I think some of those are availabe now). We could make furniture that you could only sit on a few dozen times (the "ultra-leather" could just dissolve or something). How about about cars that cease to run after 30,000 miles, probably right when you are in the middle of your road trip to Fairbanks, AK. We could make *kids* that cease to function after 12-18 months, because hey, babies are cute and no one wants to deal with your little brats anyways when they turn two years of age.
Somehow, I fear the notion of "what's good for one industry is good for everyone else" is going to get taken to extremes. The software industry applies limited use technology (i.e. software evaluations, etc.) in a reasonably responsible manner (not all applications, but most). You evaluate the software for free, and if it doesn't suck, then you actually buy or license it; it doesnt cease to install on your machine after so many tries. Software is abstract code that continually faces revision; licensing it seems like a logical idea. A copy of The Matrix is not going to change 5 years from now; why would you want to pay for a subscription or limited use fee? The business model that worked so well with software is not going to work with couches, cars, kids, or even "non-variable" digital content such as movies and music. The only way businesses will understand this is the hard way, of course; view-once DVD technology is clearly no exception. . .
Re:waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course you will. How did you get the first one? The idea is not to have specific stores for them anymore, but to make them ubiquitous. You'll see them every time you go grocery shopping, or to Wal-Mart, or even fill up your gas tank.
Re:waste (Score:5, Insightful)
This figure is for total number of rentals, and might also include video games and non-video rental items but just for the sake of showing how off these figures are, let's just assume that this is only DVD rentals.
So 10% of this figure would be about 4.4 million DVD rentals. That means that people use over 10 gallons of gas per video rental and 25 kg of carbon emissions! I think that 10 gals/video is quite funny since Blockbuster claims that there is a store within 10 miles of almost every metropolitan house.
Re:Capitalism Beats Environmentalism once more (Score:1, Insightful)
you write it, and it's +5 insightful
hypocrisy on slashdot: it's not just a good idea. it's the law
This depends on good copy protection (Score:3, Insightful)
The goal of copy protection is to create something that copies perfectly to a display device but fails to copy to a recording device. Simply creating a recording device that more perfectly emulates the display device and the signal is copyable.
Copy protection screws things up. That is how macrovision works. They screw up the signal coming out of the vcr so that recording devices with certain circuits will not record a good picture, then they lobby congress to make it illegal to produce a vcr without those circuits. (We pay the congress to work for Macrovision, what kind of a scam is that?)
DVDs don't have copy protection. If you copy an encrypted DVD you still have all the data that was on the original. Region codes and encryption (encryption is maybe too strong a word for what they do) do nothing except for make you life difficult when you are trying to read the DVD. Region codes mean that in order to watch movies you purchased you may have to buy up to seven DVD players (or 1 code-free DVD player) although it is likely that most of your movies will be from your home region.
www.flexplay.com is so informative... (Score:2, Insightful)
An interesting quote from that site:
"The environmental impact of Flexplay discs will be negligible. 100 million DVDs can fit into a cube just 10 meters (about 30 feet) on each side. Thus, the impact on local landfills will be minimal. "
lesse... 100 million discs is about one per US family. Say every family 'rents' an average of 30 of these things a year, that gives us a rectangle full of discs that's 5 stories high, 90 feet wide and 60 feet deep! What a fabulous idea! We take this medium that can last, if properly cared for, longer than the life expectency of the average person who uses it, and we build some kick-ass obsolesence into it... I hope they do this with music CDs and books, too. Maybe some kind of fading ink that gives you say, two weeks to read a book after you remove its airtight covering, then the words just dissolve away, and in the trash it goes! the_consumer loves our disposable society...
I think everyone's missing it... (Score:2, Insightful)
If this system takes off, you can expect to lose the ability to rent a lot of older titles... at least temporarily. Then, periodically, titles that are cheap enough and popular enough will get reissued, and others that would cost too much for the benefit (i.e. movies where the amount of the sale that goes directly to the studio is lower) will never be seen again.
Also, if a new copy protection or region coding "enhancement" scheme becomes available that would be backward compatible with the majority of the DVD players out there, the studios can start issuing _all_ read-once DVDs with the new scheme. That way they can force the new technology on consumers much more quickly. And if the new scheme is cracked, they can incorporate a fix just as fast as they are able to change the master being used by manufacturing. Of course, those few who have older players that won't work with the new scheme will need to "upgrade", resulting in a new royalty to the studios.
If this sounds too nefarious to be possible, go find out more about the copy protection that these same studios are trying to incorporate into CDs, or find out about the "region coding enhancement" that is on some newer DVDs. Now imagine a world where these read-once DVDs are firmly entrenched in the market, and try to imagine the studios NOT using their advantage in the supply chain to force a newer, better protection scheme on consumers. Yeah, I thought so.
The studios have noticed that drug dealers don't sell kits to help you make your own drugs whenever you want. They sell drugs directly, and customers keep coming back. Which way do you think the dealers would make more money?
D
why i wouldn't like this: (Score:2, Insightful)
People don't have a problem renting something for $5. Or buying it for $25. But if they get the same product they would have rented (and returned), or purchased and kept, and then are forced to throw it away, I think they'll be dissatisfied.
They'll realize- "hey! this is the same disc i bought for $25. those things can be made cheaply enough for me to THROW IT AWAY, so why do DVDs cost $25? Especially since it probably costs MORE to make a dvd that expires than a regular one!"
And, yes, I know that the costs are not limited to the cost of the DVD pressing. But I still would feel really odd throwing away a DVD.
It seems like, if they just dropped their prices on all DVDs (and CDs for that matter) to the 9.99 range, they'd make just as much money as now, on more sales. The lower price would, I think, discourage piracy.
You could also, though this would be annoying, have the 9.99 dvds just have the movie, while the "deluxe edition" had all the extras. Some studios do this already, to an extent.
Of course, all these arguements have been made before, but the idea of a disposable media really pounds them home more, and might even strike a chord with the mainstream consumer.
Re:waste (Score:3, Insightful)
You do remember the videotape-rental fad of the mid-1980's, don't you? You could rent movies from just about anywhere -- video store, supermarket, drug store, even the convenience store on the corner.
How many of those places still rent videos? Provably just your neighborhood Blockbuster.
It costs a lot of money to:
a) set aside retail space for movies
b) keep the section stocked with the latest and most popular movies
c) produce and distribute the media containing the movies
You won't ever see these degradable discs next to the magazine rack at the local 7-11.
Re:Capitalism Beats Environmentalism once more (Score:2, Insightful)