Didn’t they try this already with Divx? I mean this EXACT same thing and it failed? I guess the only difference was that you needed a special DVD player with a phone line attached to view those movies but otherwise it’s the same idea.
How many options do we need to watch the latest Saw? Store rental. Pay per view. Online stream. Itunes. Mail based DVD.
Who the hell is paying $5 for a rental movie anyway? It’s not even that much at BBuster.
This Flexplay technology is at least five years old. I recall when Die Another Day was released in theaters, clips from the film were sent out to the press on Flexplay discs- supposedly Q’s newest invention which would “self-destruct” 48 hours after they were played. Landfill problems aside (a big criticism of the discs), this is the only practical purpose I could see for this type of disc- promo material and screener copies of films. If you could make a screener or promo disc that couldn’t be played after a shorter period of time- like maybe a couple hours- you could have an effective promo tool with its own anti-bootlegging feature built in. As a rental, I don’t see it.
I remember reading many years ago that this was going to be THE big way to rent movies- this was just after movies started being made on DVD.
Now there’s yet another way to get movies- just today I noticed a self-serve DVD rental machine outside the Circle K (convenience store). I’ll stick with my Netflix.
Exactly. I can go to a DVD Play machine and rent a movie for one night for $1.50 or I can go to a Redbox and rent a movie for $1. (The extra 50 cents isn’t a big deal to me, but the gas it’d take to go out of my way is.) Sure, the selection is often poor, but it can be a nice way to get something while waiting on Netflix. And even with a self-destructing DVD, I could still easily copy it one way or another (especially if they are single-layer DVDs.)
That’s not much of an anti-piracy feature when it only takes five or ten minutes to rip a DVD. Even if it didn’t - imagine watching half a movie, making something to eat for dinner, then trying to resume it only to find a ruined disc.