Degrading DVD rentals
There’s a new scheme afoot for rentable DVDs. This one is called EZ-D and is brought to you by the folks at Disney. The idea is that the disc is covered with something that slowly degrades over the course of 48 hours after its first exposure, to the point where it will no longer be playable.
Sounds like DIVX, doesn’t it?
Don’t worry. It’s not. It’s not necessarily a great idea, but this one doesn’t carry the ominous spectre of death as much as DIVX did. For starters, it’s not a secondary format. It’s not competing with DVD; it works on normal DVD players. DIVX was a secondary format, with a subscription-base and a DIVX player that required a phone line to be plugged into it, and all manners of annoyances to it. Most dangerously, at the beginning of the DVD revolution, it threatened to confuse consumers who didn’t know what they wanted, and threatened to destroy the market for collectors and movie afficionados who got DVD to the point where it was truly marketable and profitable.
EZ-D — as silly a name as it is — will not lead to market confusion. It’s a simple rental scheme, and as long as discs aren’t made available in this format before DVD, we really have nothing to worry about.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, mind you. Environmentalists should be up in arms about this new level of waste that would be promoted, should the idea prosper. And renters might not like the relatively high cost of the discs, something like $7 per. I doubt this thing will survive, but let them test-market and find out for themselves.
For now, the rest of us shouldn’t be too worried about this one. It’s really a non-issue. DVD players have saturated the marketplace, relatively speaking to any other emerging tech. The market is secure. This idea, too, shall pass. Netflix.com is still a vastly better deal for anyone who plans on renting more than two discs a month.