DVDs Are Movies On Demand

from the just-not-the-way-you-thought dept

Thomas Stewart's latest column for Business 2.0 talks about the hazards of trying to predict the future. For years people have been talking about how big "movies on demand" were going to be. What they didn't realize, according to Stewart was that those movies would come on DVDs. Instead lots of people burnt lots of money trying to build complex, expensive video on demand systems that no one ever wanted. Of course, it's not clear the movie industry gets that yet. In the same issue of Business 2.0 there's another article talking about the latest attempt to offer movies on PCs (which we made fun of yesterday). The writer wonders why he would ever pay $4 to slowly download a movie that was only good for one day and only viewable on a tiny computer monitor, when he could just rent the DVD at Blockbuster instead.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Timmmmay!, 11 Sep 2002 @ 6:31am

    Tried and failed

    Anyone remember DivX -- not the AVI competitor -- the $4 DVD's that only played in a special player and expired 24 hours after you started them. No one wanted it (and I do mean **no one**) and it went down the crapper. If I didn't want it then, why would I want it now?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Not entirely bad, 11 Sep 2002 @ 7:00am

      Re: Tried and failed

      One feature of the Divx system was that the window in which you had to watch the movie did not start when you got the disc from the store but rather when you first started to watch it. Thus you could get a bunch of discs at once and watch them over a week or two and not need to match repeated trips to the video store.

      Now things like Netflixx offer some of this ability, but I don't thing a properly done Divx like system is purely evil.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.