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I just read at CNN's website that Circuit City has finally announced that they will cease the sale of their DVD players with the DIVX option. They attributed it not to a lack of consumer support, but to a lack of support from studios. I for one, who watches movies constantly, am glad that this format is dead. Not only did it charge for every viewing, but then there is the whole big brother aspect of it as well.
------------------ "So where are the nuggets on a chicken anyway?"
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DIVX was the most blatantly un-useful idea ever to come down the pike.
Basically, for a little money, you could watch a movie once. As soon as you started watching, you had 30 hours (or something like that) to watch the movie before software in your player refused to play it. For a larger fee, you could buy the same flick on the same disk without the limited viewing time. The advantage was that the disks were supposed to be reusable, but cheap enough to be disposable. You didn't have to return the disk when you'd watched the movie.
Whoop-de-doo.
The commercial interests thought of everything except for one very important factor: How do you sell something this patently useless to the public?
I'm happy to see they never did sort that part out.
DIVX is dead. May it remain so. If I cared more, I'd dance on its grave. (And if I were that close, I'd definitely spit.)
--Baloo
------------------ American Society of Newspaper Editors motto: "Proudly Maintaining the (Continued on Page A-4)". www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/
[This message was edited by Baloo on June 17, 1999.]
Also RIP: DIVX. Good. Good to see an asinine concept get gutted in the marketplace. They didn�t get the fundamental problem: when people buy something, when they own it, they don�t want to have to pay to use it again. Plus, people just can�t get used to throwing away CDs, unless they say AOL on them. And even then you hesitate. But it would have worked with VCR tapes. People are used to tossing videotapes; they�re cheap, they�re ubiquitous. If they�d sold videotapes that need never be returned, because they would self-erase after you broke the seal, they would have made millions. No more returns.
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