Consumer hatred works.
People could have dumped Netflix and all this other shit and forced better products…
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.
At the same time, nearly everything on PCs was watched with DivX, which made things annoyingly confusing
OK I knew something sounded wrong about this but couldn’t remember what
Divx was a video codec and much better than the others at that time. It was super confusing when Circuit City announced their DIVX program.
Yeah DivX was awesome. Really led the way in allowing videos to be shared online. I wouldn’t have seen half the anime I did if it wasn’t for it.
I think the first DivX I watched was Princess Mononoke. Not a bad start for sure!
Mine was a cam recording of Scary Movie 2. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Not the fault of the codec. I avoided cams after that and waited for the screeners.
But oh boy did I love my divx South Park episodes.
I probably haven’t watched a movie in 5 years.
Was .AVI the output of a DivX rip?
Yup.
.avi is a container format. It can contain a divx video stream or almost any other encoding of video as well as audio streams and other media. It isn’t exclusive to divx.
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 just now realized that XviD was DivX backwards.
Back in the day, I never knew the difference between the two, I just saw DivX getting gradually replaced by XviD.
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 surrounded 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.
Circuit City was circling the drain by the mid 90s
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.
But but the jingle said ‘Service was state of the art’
They were WAY ahead of their time, clearly.
lets make a reusable item single use, cuz landfills won’t top themselves
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.
Technology Connections has a video on those.
I feel like you’re forgetting that shareholder profits can be maximized.
Relevant
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.
If you had a subscription, you could have a Netflix disc indefinitely. You just couldn’t rent any new movies/shows until you returned it.
If you cancelled your subscription and kept the disc, then yeah they hit you with a “higher than cost” fee.
And it was a pretty great deal when you watched a load of movies, like my family did. We were very early adopters. Queue over a hundred titles deep and it never shrank because we added as fast as they came.
Ohh yeah. A huge movie buff buddy of mine had the 8 disc plan and rigged up a multiburner pc. His mail was also dropped off in the morning.
Dude would get up, grab his 8 movies, get them burning, go to work and drop them off in the post box same day. He’d have new movies every couple of days. He built a hilariously large movie library in just a few months.
That good “early to no broadband” pirating.
Also unlike modern day streaming, they didn’t have to worry about obtaining the rights to the movies. They could just buy the DVD from any retailer.
So there were no platform exclusives to worry about.
To be fair, it was reusable, you just had to pay to use it again.
Unfortunately it relied on dial up internet, cause home broadband was pretty rare back then.
Technology connections did a video about something related: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ccneE_gkSAs
Great video!
IIRC, they were just normal DVDs, with a layer which would gradually become opaque after exposure to air, turning them into garbage.
That was an entirely separate disposable rental DVD company
That video is why I was so confident in saying FlexPlay was a different product lol. He’s one of 11 subscriptions I have on YouTube
Some of us remember when this happened, and most folks either ignored or actively hated the idea.
The PA divx player became a recurring character I thought, I’m surprised searching their site only comes up with three comics.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/archive/search?tag=86&sort=old
The first one (IIRC and according to the search)
It’s (the formats) downfall was thinking these companies could charge twice the price of a normal DVD player to consumers, just so the consumers could rent a DVD and not have to return it. That, coupled with the younger crowd not having a working phone line in their house by 1998, as cell phones started taking over.
God, imagine the piles and piles of garbage dvd’s that would have been thrown away if this had taken over normal rentals.
To the curious: Redbox kiosks popped up around 4 years later in 2002.
twice the price of a normal DVD player to consumers
$500 was the standard rate for a player in '98. Maybe a little cheaper. But why bother buying a marginally smaller newer version of Laserdisc if the discs themselves evaporate?
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.
Just a stupid idea.
Ironically the “viewable for 48 hours” is now the model for renting streamed movies using a special device. They were ahead of their time.
Hopefully all these things follow the same path. Bankruptcy. Like their morals.
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 it for 24 or 48 hours.
Oh o remember that. And it wasn’t on demand either, it was just that movie over and over again so you had to line up your viewing with their timeframe, right?
And I had a dude down the road always ready with a card to slap in my box so I could watch every channel for free.
I watched Bigger, Longer, and Uncut first, then Cruel Intentions. I don’t remember the movie, but I was way into the actresses. Good god Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon really made my 14 year old brain short out bad. I can’t remember a single thing, seriously, but I watched it like 30 times.
It’s not that ironic.
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’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.
What’s hilarious is that divx was the most popular pirate format back in the day before they went commercial use and xvid replaced it.
I think that was deliberate, and some pirate cheekily named the file format after a hated junk DVD format
Yeah I remember it being called “DivX ;)” so DivX with a wink.
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.
ITT: people confusing DIVX with DivX
Don’t act like they’re stupid for not knowing the difference because of the caps lol.
Where am I doing that?
DivX was purposefully named to mock DIVX.
Sorry, I’ve only ever seen the “ITT” comments used to make fun of people.
You might be projecting your own biases.
I sure did
Pfff DivX, real G’s use XviD!
Movie.Title[2009]DvDrip-aXXo
I’m actually surprised no one got sued for trademark infringement. Two video-related products having such similar names.
DIVX flopped hard and was gone within a year. DivX was just mocking them afterwards.
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.
I remember this. I absolutely hated the DIVX format, and was rooting for it to die.
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.
That seems like a lot of work relative to just buying a normal DVD
Kids often have access to resources like that, but no cash. It checks out.
You’re right. I only bought one or two of those, total. They were dumb.
Could you just hit them with clearcoat right out of the gate?
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.
Is Don_Dickle the gallowboob of Lemmy? Been seeing them everywhere
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.
