TIL Circuit City created a proprietary disposable type of DVD called a DIVX that was viewable for only 48 hours after initial viewing unless an additional fee was paid. Which led to bankruptcy

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.

OK I knew something sounded wrong about this but couldn't remember what

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.

Ironically the “viewable for 48 hours” is now the model for renting streamed movies using a special device. They were ahead of their time.

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.

Don't act like they're stupid for not knowing the difference because of the caps lol.

Pffft DivX, real G's use XviD!

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'm actually surprised no one got sued for trademark infringement. Two video-related products having such similar names.

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.

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'

Circuit City was circling the drain by the mid 90s

Circuit City had a rough transition out of the 90s. For a while they were pretty highly-regarded because they had salesmen who actually knew their shit. They had specialization of skills within the store, so the sales experience was excellent.

But with the rise of internet sales, mega-store's like Frys, and Best Buy going to the Walmart model, they couldn't keep up that level of service while being price competitive. Some stores really tried to keep the service excellent, but they did it by cutting back on things like maintenance and checkout staff, so you had some stores that were filthy and took forever to check out, but had full staffing in the sales departments.

But in the end their salespeople weren't enough to keep them alive. Especially when you could learn what you needed from them, then go to the next strip mall down the road and buy the products at Best Buy for 20% less.

My last time there I was trying to buy a GPS for someone. I walked up to the counter and saw the GPS I wanted. I couldn't get either of the people behind that counter to sell it too me. They were pushing something else and simply wouldn't sell it to me. I went to best buy and purchased it. A few years later they were done.

I feel like you're forgetting that shareholder profits can be maximized.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Could you just hit them with clearcoat right out of the gate?

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?

Great video!

"What if DIVX goes bankrupt?”

"Well, its almost impossible to believe that DIVX could go under!"

Well that aged poorly.

Initially, only a single Zenith player was available starting at $499, along with 20 to 50 titles. Very few players sold during this time period, with The Good Guys chain alleging that fewer than 10 players were sold during this time period.

This seems to be the fundamental flaw in the plan. If the DVDs just faded over time, but were system agnostic, they likely could have worked as a distribution scheme. But who is going to go $500 out of pocket (in '98 no less, so closer to $1000 today) for a player that eats your discs after two days?

I think that was deliberate, and some pirate cheekily named the file format after a hated junk DVD format

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.

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.

That was an entirely separate disposable rental DVD company