Finnaly it’s here, this weekend my daughter invited me over to watch a movie, she works at a DVD distribution company nearby and she had a few samples home with her.
It turned out to be quite interesting, the DVD’s was of the new ‘SELF DISTRUCT’ kind, those who only works for a limited time (in this case 48h) and then are rendered useless (details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-D).
Several things immediately came into mind;
How does it work 🙂 I found an entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-D but this does not say much on how the technology works, then I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EZ-D a apparently similar product which was abandoned by Disney earlier. As I can tell its not quite the same technology, as the DVD-D disks do not turn color. From what I can tell the DVD-D disks have a small hole in them, my guess would be, that this hole has to do with the protection, could be that air somehow is let in via this hole and starts some decomposition.. an interesting experiment would thus in future be to try and close this hole (superglue or something) and see if this would stop the process. Also the package does not seem air-tight, hence it would appear the process does not begin before first play, maybe triggered by the heat of the laser!?
Another issue.. The environmental one, disposable DVD’s… hmm is this environmentally friendly? At first thought no, but then again… rental DVD’s have to be returned, many people go out start their car and drive to the local DVD shop returning the DVD which obviously is equally disturbing.. Hence, I would tend to say, not environmentally friendly, but maybe not all that bad either.. Maybe some sort of return system could be put into place, say you would have to pay 50cent (like soda and beer cans in Denmark) which was returned upon returning the dvd-d to the reseller, but this likely would be complex to implement.
Perspectives;
I find the perspective of this technology fascinating, just think no more going outside a cold winter day returning a rental DVD.. nice.. Also you could buy/rent your movie many days in advance, and then watch it at your leisure.
However, just one problem for now, the price.. from what I could tell the price for these dvd’s are 1/3 higher than regular rental dvd’s 🙁 This would have to be equaled out before this turns into a ‘blockbuster’ (or maybe rather a blockbuster killer, as such dvd’s could be sold from anywhere)…
Below a picture of the ‘hole’ I mentioned earlier…
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