I mentioned the tragedy of the commons a couple of times in this video. This is an old but (in my opinion) underutilized term for the concept of what happens when shared resources are used by individuals acting in their own best interest. Although the term is flawed and some situations are far more complex than can be explained in four easy words, it’s a useful reminder that things that seem harmless on an individual level can scale in ways we can’t grasp. If you’d like to learn a little more about this concept, check out this website I found; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
That's a really neat website! Thanks for telling me about it! Seems to have a lot of really informative articles! That are editable by the common people! It's almost like a recursive example of TotC itself!
@@unusefulidiot externalities is an economic concept and focuses on the fact that they exist and what problem that causes to try and make a tangeable cost benefit analysis. Whereas the tragedy of the commons is what it is called in environmental science and is what is actually being discussed in the video the environment and the lower efficiency and waste produced over another product. Something externalities does not look at as it is focused on one product itself rather than alternatives and greater societal good.
don't believe they received multiple patients except for what was actually " designed, prototyped & tested ". . . . . . . . . & ya don't get an exclusive patent for " Vaperware ".
@@robozstarrr8930 At one time you had to prove something worked to get a patent. But that requirement disappeared a long time ago. Which has created a mess from people who thought of an idea claiming rights to someone who did all the effort in making it work.
@@russellhltn1396 really, that's sad...did some patients in the 90's and we had to have a proof of concept /schematic/documentation/prototype ( that worked ). all i recall later were the renewal cost went sky high . . but if's thats the case shortly i'm gonna submit anti-gravity, backwards time travel ( at the speed of dark ) and HS dark skin gurls with short white hair, freckles and tan lines . . (cause that's my jam!)
I remember my dad talking about these. They were very popular with long-haul truck drivers. You could get these things at the major truck stops, watch the movie in the off time, then toss it. Most truckers had a portable TV/DVD, but not a ton of space to store movies. And since many places, especially in the Midwest, didnt have Redbox yet, it could be hard to return a rented disk on time. Another perk was a trucker could buy these disks on the company account while buying other work supplies at the truck stops or even pay with cash. If a driver wanted to use Redbox, they woud have to use their own personal credit card. So, I guess the Flexplay system did "work", but only for a relatively small market. Of course, when truckers started using Wi-Fi or smart phones, there was no need to use disks at all.
@@stephensnell5707 Right except dvds are impossible to play and really hard to sit down with a dvd player in the car when phones are 10x smaller and more convient? Youre bad at this.
@@vipervidsgamingplus5723 *Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Not open source, it becomes public domain. Also not JUST after some years. It becomes public domain x years after you do not pay the maintenance fees. (4, 8, 12 years depending on the patent)
I actually still have one I purchased from Staples, The Kite Runner. IT STILL WORKS! The disc has air gaps in the center that allows oxygen to slowly degrade the disc, BUT if you quickly apply superglue after opening to seal that gap.... no degradation! At the time this wasn't a mystery and info and methods were readily available online via forums. I only bought the disc for the challenge of making it permanent. I was an early Netflix and Blockbuster by Mail so even paying $5-6 to permanently own the disc wasn't that appealing because the selection was poor and I still had to drive TO the store to buy it.
@@JoQeZzZ There's more than your own physical property at play, though. You have to consider the intellectual property aspect, and the terms of the rental license, which this is technically a violation of.
Truck Driver here: these were cool, but kinda on the expensive side if I recall. They were great for us, as getting back into a place to return a DVD could never be guaranteed. Hence, the truck stops you mentioned them being in: captive audience. Except that audiobooks were cheaper, and in only a year or two, smart phones were available so these were much less useful.
Truckers was the market I thought of, too (I have a friend who's been one for 20 years). Get the disk at the truck stop, watch it when you stop for the night or a break so you don't drive too many hours, and toss it. But it turns out that Netflix worked pretty well for that, too. My friend would get his three DVDs, take them on his trip, mail them from wherever, and have three more waiting for him when he got home.
There is something so horribly depressing about this, I can just picture a little kid buying Chrarrolets Web and not understanding why their favorite movie just stopped
Yah I could see a completely ignorant parent (or Karen) buying this in a store and then flipping out about it no longer working because they didn't pay attention to the package.
One of the earliest "nightmares" I had as a kid involved me reading books that destroyed themselves after 1 reading, and video games that self-destructed after you beat them. This kind of shaped me into the non-wasteful person I am now. Learning just now that something dystopian like this actually existed, makes me sick to my stomach.
I remember hearing about a pvp game, I think it was called Yolo where if you die, you can't play the game anymore. Sounds dumb, and there was no chance that a game like that would keep a community.
Ngl, a premise where a kid keeps resetting thier favourite game and never beating it to stop this from happening would make a good premise for a creepy or at least sad film.
@@blakksheep736 i agree! why not make the video game characters a *bit* more self-aware after each reset? it could be little things changing, like some lines being a bit different (using different words/sentences instead of just going by the script) or the character(s) trying to outright talk to the player through the screen!
@@mioko5679 great idea. And halfway through the main character takes the kid aside to ask what's wrong, then it's revealed why he keeps resetting. If we want a happy ending, we can then have the two work together to break the cycle, only for the kid to realise this means he will likely not ever see his favourite game again. The movie ends with the hero comforting him, telling him its time to move onto other games, as well as the rest of his life. ❤
Another problem: The consumer is much more likely to rent another movie if they have to return the first one, continuing the rental cycle. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “environmentalist pressure” was applied by the rental companies themselves.
I honestly doubt it since the tech would require a business model that was inflexible due to having to buy a lot of overhead that might never sell while simply renting discs multiple times has more flexibility and can off-load the discs later when that many of the same title are no longer needed. What I mean is that even if the tech worked as advertised and they managed to get enough studios to give them licenses to make all of the popular movies, it'd actually cost more to run a video rental store with Flexplay movies than it would the traditional rental plan. The profit margin would be worse for stores selling Flexplay movies than it would if they simply stocked a handful of the popular movie titles to rent out repeatedly due to the fact the initial high cost of buying the actual DVDs would be offset by the ability to continually rent them until the discs wore out making them more money in the long run. Flexplay, in my opinion, was simply not a threat to the video rental industry like streaming services and the Internet ended up being.
Talking about self-destructive media storage, Hideo Kojima (that Metal Gear daddy) once thought of using this kind of CD when developing Metal Gear Solid. He said if Snake died, the PlayStation disc would be permanently unusable. Good thing this tech never took off.
Surprisingly Redbox is still popular. The one at the grocery store I work at has people standing in front of it all day. I'm glad disc rentals haven't fully died out. Watching my mom come home from work with a Redbox disc in her hand was always an awesome treat and I always got excited to see what new movie we would be watching.
I miss going to the video store. Sure, nowadays I can watch anything I want with just a few clicks, but it's just not the same. I'm glad I at least got to experience it though. I got to be a kid during the video rental heyday, and it was awesome!
Tested one of these back in the day by leaving it constantly running in a DVD player. After about a day and a half the image began to get scambled and it was unplayable within an hour
It's probably a good thing the patent included so many different ideas for self-destructing discs. Imagine the waste if people kept trying to make the idea stick and one of them did.
The patent only protects what's written in the patent's claims. Those are usually a lot less expansive than the written description, since you have to actually make it work before you can claim it.
It’s really not the worst idea I’ve ever heard of, it just sounds dystopian but definitely has a purpose. Older people who only use physical or you know someone without cable or internet maybe taking a trip to a cabin etc. I’d wager it might even be less wasteful than some trips back to return a dvd in person. Pretty niche tho lol
The irony is that the local supermarket has an endcap loaded with regular DVDs costing $2.99-$7.99 each -- none of which will commit suicide after 48 hours. :-)
Back in college, I bought one of these from Staples. I used my DVD player drive and copied it. I still have the video file even though the disc has been long gone for 15 years.
"Mission: Impossible" actually featured a view-once video tape (at the end; Smoke emanated from the tape). It would be easy to implement. For example, you could have a battery in the gap in one corner of the tape, other electrical components (mainly a capacitor) in another corner, and an explosive that can be detonated by an electric current (RDX would work work well, as long noone drops the tape) between the reels in the middle. Then there would be two electrodes (maybe metal wheels) in contact with the tape at one point, and a piece of the tape at the end replaced with aluminium foil (to make an electrical connection between the electrodes when that point is reached). Of course, people might complain if it blew up their whole room, or you might lose repeat business if customers were killed by the shrapnel of the video recorder. You could make an incendiary version (more like the film) by putting vials of potassium permanganate and glycerol in the gaps between the reels, with a mechanism to open a door between them (to cause them to mix).
@@foxtrot1962 They know and use DVDs well. However it is a taboo to watch foreign DVDs in North Korea, but most citizens do it anyway. Most are smuggled from China or sent by South Koreans via balloon, along with post cards, diskettes, hand written notes, drawings, posters and etc., as a campaign to educate, inform, show love, and piss off North Koreans.
That disc packaging is like software that has the user license inside the package that states "By opening this package you agree to the Terms and Service."
In the late 90s my mom got really into doing online surveys and stuff to earn gift cards and what not, and I remember one company who would mail us VHS tapes to react to, but they were single use. Once you played the tape, it would destroy itself. I was always curious about how that worked.
@@MrBrightcide For me, it's an indication that we live in the most hypocritical one. Let's be honest, the Flexplay people didn't expect anyone to come back to the store to recycle the discs, they bet on people buying the discs and tossing them out with their household trash without caring about the environmental impact. But the concept was so wasteful that even Joe Public found it a tad harsh on the environment. PS: I think some people boycotted Flexplay as a retroactive middle-finger to all those useless unsolicited AOL CDs they had received in the mail through the previous years.
Interestingly enough, growing up in western Pennsylvania, the best video rental store was a sub-store inside Giant Eagle grocery stores. The “Iggle Video” stores severely cut into blockbuster’s business in the area, especially since you could grab the movie while getting groceries, and the rental terms were usually long enough that it was convenient to drop it off next week when you needed more groceries, and Iggle was just closer to the neighborhood, usually, also.
Lady Brightcynder I agree it’s wasteful but at least it is something that’s useful and can be recycled. It’s crazy to think how many products are sold every day who’s packaging contains more plastic than that disc does and the majority of the time it just gets tossed out.
If it's canned soup then I'm not sure the majority of DVD's won't. Millitary canned rations from the korean war were still edible from what I read a few years back. :P
That's not really true, as almost every rental store had the drop box just inside the front door and some form of external drop slot for when they were closed. While some folks might decide to rent another movie while they were there, stopping in front of the door while a kid shoved the movies in the slot was more common. Granted I didn't spend long hours working in a video rental store, but people watching while waiting for my girlfriend/fiancé/wife to pick out movies over the years showed me that the vast majority of people returning movies never entered past the drop box and the vast majority of people renting movies didn't drop any off as they came in.
@@andrewapplegarth334 The video rental market was largely founded on the idea of returns generating more rentals and sustained multiple national chains before digital services displaced them. As a counterpoint I guess we do have you sitting in a car prepping recall bias
@@andrewapplegarth334 Not that this weird self-destruct DVDs ever crossed the pond, but I don't think rental stores had such boxes over here. Not that I used them much, but AFAIK they wanted to see the media being returned to check for scratches and misplaced disks/cassettes.
It's hard to say if this is more or less dystopian than the modern streaming subscription model. Nowadays your license to view a movie you enjoy can be revoked at any given time with no warning, and I have to imagine the massive servers have an environmental impact as well
And because of that, movie piracy has pretty much come back. Netflix, much like Spotify, almost killed piracy in their own segments when they arrived but now that every movie studio wants their own pies instead of sharing it like music streaming services do a lot of people went back to downloading.
Also they can edit their content at any time (to comply with the latest fashions in politics, for example, or because a government forced them to) and you'll never be able to watch the old version or even know for sure that it was changed. Soon this can be done with AI deepfakes so that it is possible to "re-shoot" a scene with different dialogue and action, without the participation or consent of anyone involved in the original production. I think those who archive digital media (legally or not) are doing a great service -- they ensure that people in the future will be able to watch what we watch, and understand our own era better, as it really was and not as the censors of the future want it to have been.
Everything is digital now, you just lease everything you pay for online. If your account gets banned or the service goes down, you lose everything. You don't own anything in the digital age.
@@Teh_Random_Canadian Everyone knows lol, people pay $5 for streaming services because they want to watch some stuff on the go, they don't care about "owning" movies or shows. If they did they'd just buy the DVD and then copy it
@@Teh_Random_Canadian yarr harr if you ask me sort of like how buying original cartridges to legally rip them for emulators is something some people do. Just a thought
@@gamespender8605 I get that, if you follow the law by the letter then sure. The money you use to buy a hard copy so you can play on a emulator isn't going to the developer anyways, just a third party. What I mean is if for some reason steam goes offline in a few years there would be billions of dollars worth of purchased games that people would no longer would be able to access
@@Teh_Random_Canadian In all fairness many steam libraries simply dwarf what would be possible with physical disks. Most people simply don't have the room for thousands or even just hundreds of games. As long as the game is physically installed to your pc and is playable offline, you'll be able to play it for as long as you have it installed.
Ah, I remember these. I remember reading about them before they came out and hating the idea immediately. So much waste, so much greed, so much pointlessness when other solutions (video rentals, especially) already existed. I was very pleased to find that most of humanity agreed with me, and this stupid product failed hard.
I just imagine someone taking that special someone out for dinner and then coming home for a movie blowing the dust off of the plastic wrap and being like "I've been saving this for just the right special occasion" smelling the freshly open dvd and being like "ah yes this was a good year." popping it in and being like "damn why isn't it working?!" And the whole night is ruined because they didn't print the best by date on the outside of the package smh
There was a VHS version of this in the early 90s. It would self erase itself with the mechanism that would slowly lower a magnet onto the video tape as you watch it after five times. Needless to say it didn't work well when they realize people can just open up the video tape and remove the magnets.
Yeah I got one of those once; it had some kind of STUPID promotional thing on it, nothing worth watching. Took me about 30 seconds (because it said on the package it would erase itself after one watching) to find the magnet and remove it, and then tape over the stupid promotional with something else.
The problem I have with the proposal that streaming is worse environmentally is that you also have to *ship* the DVDs everywhere, and it's a lot easier to solar/wind power a data center than to make a delivery fleet that doesn't burn dinosaurs.
There are a lot of rare metals and other environmentally troublesome materials in server rooms. Same is true of electric vehicles. They're not identical, but I'd struggle to say one is meaningfully better.
I could see this being useful for one purpose. The need to transfer information that is sensitive. Having a set period of time would limit the chances of other people using it to get that information.
"...as usual, in the event that you or your IM force be captured or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your organization. This disc will self-destruct in 48 hours, long after your mission is complete and the information becomes irrelevant anyway."
@@craZivn I'd wager they can probably adjust the formula to have the disc destroy itself much faster. 48 hrs was the desired rental period, not a happy accident.
I actually remember these things from long ago. We never rented them but I remember seeing them in stores. Also there’s an issue with DVD rental/single use DVD things. Once you buy/rent the DVD, throw it in your computer and rip the disk. You have successfully obtained the movie for less then it costs to buy it.
Of course I'm sort of biased, but I wish you'd talked about the chemistry going on in the disc. It's an absolutely fascinating (and really clever) process!
You know what? It honestly never crossed my mind to get into how this actually worked! I was more interested in exploring the rental angle and how pointless it was. And I suppose by the time I got through there the script was long enough that I just considered it done? I don't really know. Usually I am quite interested in getting into the nitty gritty like that but for whatever reason this time I just wasn't. Weird!
It looks simple enough. The Flexplay discs use a dye to store 1s and 0s. When the dye turns dark, the player just sees a bunch of 1s on the disc. - It’s similar to how CD+Rs gradually die with age (the recording dye darkens & becomes unreadable).
With regards to electricity usage of streaming services: Amount-wise, they _might_ be as bad as disposable rentals. BUT, the difference is that pollution from electricity generation is *centralized* and thus easier to manage/regulate/enforce. With disposable rentals, the pollution will be dispersed through millions of households, whose regulation-compliance definitely vary across the spectrum and likely not practically enforceable. Not to mention the additional energy -- thus pollution -- required to deliver the disabled discs to a recycling point. So considering all factors, streaming services at the end is likely to be less negatively-impacting the Earth than disposable rentals.
Also playing dvds requires electricity and if all the grids were nationalised or internationalised respectively we could have an entirely clean energy grid if some stubborn mules didnt pay people to scream WHAT ARE YOU DOING! In the us and in other countries people cared
I made the same argument regarding electric cars. Someone was saying that all they do is move the pollution to the power plant. Even if the amount of pollution turned out to be the same, there are maybe tens of thousands of power plants worldwide and they're all managed by governments or large companies, as opposed to billions of cars in the hands of individuals. Power plants can be better located, and they're much easier to control, maintain, and upgrade/replace with something more efficient.
I'm not sure if this is pointing at the "streaming an episode on Netflix is as bad as driving 4 miles" myth, but that myth can actually be debunked by calculating a few things from first principles. You can look at the average CO2 pollution from a car, and look at how much the energy costs that can be generated for that much pollution. If you take a common bitrate for video, you can calculate how much energy (and cost) per MB you'd use according to the claim. Turns out, it's orders of magnitude more expensive than even normal home internet connections, not to mention your actual subscription cost to Netflix. The ISPs between you and the servers could not be running a profit (by orders of magnitude) if they were using enough energy to stream that episode to you, to match the exhaust of a car driving multiple miles. That's the bottom-up approach. You can also look at the data that goes through the large internet exchanges, multiply that by the emissions per GB you'd get from that claim, and you'll end up with equally ridiculous numbers. That's the top down approach. The final part of debunking this claim is the energy usage of the servers at Netflix. There you can look at a Raspberry Pi, which can easily stream 4K HDR video files at the bitrates Netflix uses, as long as you're not transcoding (which doesn't happen on the fly at Netflix either). That Raspberry Pi only uses a couple Watts (+ a couple more for the hard drive) to do so, and can easily handle multiple streams. The energy the Raspberry Pi uses while streaming an episode is absolutely tiny compared to even starting the engine of your car (let alone drive around). Given that power usage and cooling are typically the largest costs of running a datacenter, Netflix will at least match the efficiency of this setup (otherwise, it would make economic sense to fill datacenters with Raspberry Pis...). I did the actual calculations a while back in a Reddit comment, I can provide a link if anyone is interested. Either way , when push comes to shove. Your TV or even laptop is going to be the vast majority of the power usage you cause when watching Netflix or any other streaming platform. Watching a DVD/Bluray vs streaming really doesn't impact your CO2 footprint by a lot. The emissions caused by the manufacturing and supply chains for the DVDs in an average 2005 person's collection probably is already much worse than decades of regular streaming will cause through datacenter and infrastructure energy usage...
Another point against this format that you don't mention: specifically for childrens' titles, like the example disc you have: childrens' titles are much more likely to be watched over and over again multiple times. When kids get a movie they like, they tend to watch it over and over. So Flexplay partnering with specifically Disney makes even less sense.
“Ban permanent copies” sounds like the videogame model. I have tons of PS1/2 discs but I cannot play them on PS5. They have to be repurchased through the online service .
Here's an idea they overlooked: Issue a container that is large enough for 30 disks, to all customers on first rental. Once a customer has filled the container with used disks, they can return it, and in return get a free rental of their choice. Not only do you then encourage the customer to return the disks for recycling, you save the customer the hassle of doing it after every rental.
I never really thought about whether DVDs were easy to copy or not. All the stuff I've read about encryption schemes had to do with preventing them from being ripped to an MPEG file, since by that point online piracy had long since supplanted concerns of people taking advantage of their local rental chain.
Pocket Fluff Productions My uncle practically had a side business selling burned DVDs. He’d print the covers for the cases and the dvd themselves and had flyers of new movies coming out and he sold them for just a few bucks. I’m not sure he really made much money doing it, I think he just did it for something to do and it was mostly just to family and friends. I think I just recently threw away a box of DVDs I had from that time. Other than the case being a bit thinner they looked just like what you’d buy in the store. He just passed away so I suppose that FBI warning no longer really applies.
Still doing it... round about with capture and netflix/hbogo. As for disk copy protection, for the most part it's a joke. There are disks that are hard to crack, but any quality software can force through. To date I've only run into 2 disks I couldn't rip to my Plex server from my collection; Expendables 2 and 3.
The funny thing is, that's exactly what I used to do with DVDs. I would go watch the movie in the theater, then dutifully buy the DVD when it came out and then never watch it.
There was actually an attempt to market a self-destructing VHS format. I think it was called One-View. The tape would somehow erase itself as you watched it. Not sure if the resulting blank tape could be reused for recording or not.
The tape wouldn't erase itself while watching. They were set up to erase all content when the tape was rewound. You could watch the tape once, but if you tried to rewind it and watch again, all you got was static. In the mid 90s, I was in a focus group for one of the major TV stations. I would get one of these stupid tapes every few weeks to preview new shows, mostly pilots. No, you couldn't record onto the tape afterwards. I'm not sure how it worked.
@@ShannonRice-hc2kr A bulk-eraser magnet that swung into place when the tape was pulled the other way to rewind, maybe? Or else what @notpublic5159 said. And I'll bet _some_ people out there opened these up and defeated the destructive mechanism. Or moved the reels to a regular cassette's shell _before_ rewinding.
@@grandetaco4416 At least one of them they sent to me actually came in a fancy metal tin (like an Altoids one, but bigger and thinner). I was impressed, but I already had AOL at the time.
I like how in the US people were constantly thinking about creating a service that lets people rent movies cheaper and more convenient way, while in Russia people were constantly thinking about how to make their torrent trackers become more reliable and accessable for everyone who wants to illeagaly download a movie and watch it.
@@VideoArchiveGuy >Torrent trackers: invented and popularized in the late 90s and early 2000s >Communist regime in Russia: ended in the mid to late 80s
I remember walking through an airport terminal and seeing a kiosk that was renting DVDs along with portable players. I don’t know if the DVDs were destructible, but the DVD players certainly weren’t, so you’d have to return something (again, negating the self-destruct feature).
Weren't users supposed to return the players and discs before boarding their flights by any chance ? (Therefore renting and returning the stuff at the same airport)
Clerk gives you 12655723162254307425418678245150829297671403862274660768187828858528140823147351237817802795619571074765208532598060224803240903782164769430795025578054271906283387643826088448124626488332623608376164081221171179439885840257818732919037889603719186743943363062139593784473922231852782547619771723889252476871186000174697934549112845662596182308280390615184691924446215552586523740084932807259056238962104689731522587564412231618018774350801526839567367444928206231310973619440354723718012867753019556135721376207959558860559933052856914157120622980057169891912595926540427596853441276985006724869558201930657900240943007657817473684008944448183219124163017666607770667585082169598239230274035517738648065600492702095732843492708856036920219883363111527988109277392696562776813446645651238419301586157342867860646666350050113314787911320639668510871569846664873595017518995670958477806411667505346462590471136862647349666243426242677175204732314281064417939041868653741187423064985189556742640111598580035644021835576715752869397465453828584471291269955890393294448315746500268702149708808053100406398480942695623586049403348084970064668900206251516968479727515576425962392136269169089884609794271331061018895634421094082310408889752954265842691732460538911784960000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 disks.
the fun thing with these is that you could, if you had a home computer (most had CD drives at this time), burn it to your computer and have a permanent working digital copy.
@@lucusthedreamer6426godamnit you damaged my replying comesaolFJDnsnflsnaklljndsknLk;SJFkjesDEFEds:F:LSF;fds..';.'][;];',;].;],;].,;;.[,;.][,---------------------
Ea: yeah the vids up... Seems like an idea. Money??? Fuck ton. This one dude says disposable DLC.... Fucking great idea should hire him.... About to make millions. Let's go make this shit
the good thing about their patent thingy is, if anyone had had that idea again in the 10 or so years until the patent runs out they wouldve had to pay that patent too in whatever way they wouldve made the selfdestrution of the dvd into reality. so they pretty much ensured it wouldnt be a problem ever again :D
Back in the 90's I was sent a VHS tape with a pilot episode for a sitcom that never came out. It was labeled as self destructing, so I took the tape apart before playing and found a magnet against the tape on the empty roll side. I was able to easily remove it and make it repayable lol. I wonder if its still at my moms house somewhere.
At least you had a warning. Imagine if you'd watched it then after the end titles you were told it had self destructed! Also lucky you could unscrew it (though rivets can be drilled out like I've done when repairing tapes which have snapped off at the end)
@@Anythingoes88 I don't recall ever seeing rivets holding a VHS together. Not that I ever really looked for them, but it's the kind of thing I would notice If I saw it. I really wanna go look for that tape but the times are weird right now.
Gotta love how he managed to futureproof for Disney+ when it was about half a year away! Also, did Flexplay ever think about the obvious thing of just backing up the ISO file?
Considering LOTS of us were still completely capable of ripping... No, flexplay didn't think about anti-piracy in the slightest. They thought "A time limit's good enough"... AND clearly never ran into someone who'd take the first opportunity of viewing the thing to go ahead and rip it down... The quality's going to be better on most rippers if you play it normally anyway... Actual technical efforts to counteract ripping would be implemented around or just after this point in time, but even that was slow to hit mainstream production, overly complicated in manufacturing means, and generally only a matter of time before some enterprising individuals would figure out "the work around" anyway... Even today, nearly any form of security that's older than 3 months has already been hacked successfully. Older than a year, and there's likely a product somewhere for your home convenience of hacking it, cracking it, or fooling it on your own. ;o)
@@hannahranga yes but at least with rentals, you dont loose the investment of the original dvd and can just rent it to someone else. Most often people rented most movies once anyway.
Another reason no doubt movie rental stores in their heyday surely didn't want Flexplay, aside from making it so much easier for store outlets everywhere to compete with them.... is that it kept customers from coming back a 2nd time. And that second time often resulted in renting more movies, or at least seeing them. Anyway this guys videos are well researched and interesting! good work
Even if it succeeded past these two trial periods I guarantee it would have been a PR nightmare. How often do you read the interior of DVD/Bluray packaging? You probably don't. Now imaging being say, a parent thinking you just snagged a cheap DVD for you kid in a "dixie pack", you get home and let your kid watch it. Then a day later your kid wants to watch the movie again, they pop it in, then com running to you crying that the movie doesn't work anymore, especially since nowhere on the outside of the package did it mention that the DVD would self destruct. It's perfect that it's round and metallic like a landmine because this thing would be a nightmare for anyone unfortunate enough to work in that customer service department, and probably a lawsuit waiting to happen. Not to mention now you can get some pretty good bargain bin movies for five bucks a pop now anyway.
I really doubt they would have had PR backlash. The packaging is super-clear about what it is. I mean, the very top of the package says "No return DVD *rental.* " Not "sale." And the 2-day limit is mentioned on the front sidebar. Are there some aggressively stupid people out there who'd manage to miss all the copy? Probably. But it's hard to imagine them being sympathetic enough to create any kind of backlash. More likely they'd be mocked for their illiteracy.
@Jason Blalock A lot of PR disasters happen because of dumb people assuming things. Since when has intelligence been required to be a human with opinions?
And that's only if you live in a country that traditionally has a booming video rental market. In China you don't even have to pay anything for many movies if you are okay with ads and lower resolution (without membership most sites locks the 1080p option), and if you want the rest of the titles the price is as low as $2/mo for (almost) unlimited streaming. It's only when you want to archive the movie without doing shady acts that you need to pay more (and IIRC blu-rays are more expensive in China because of this).
Nearest couple of places to me that have large 24 hour supermarkets(38-45 miles away), they sell pretty new releases of DVD's for £5 or less, and Blurays for £10 or less. Which makes some of the charges for VOD seem astronomical, take IT for example, I can get both the original IT(1990) and the new IT Part 1(2017) on DVD for £5 each, but on UA-cam, to rent the original IT, it's £3.49 for 48 hours(start within 30 days, watch within 48 hours of start) OR £9.99 to buy.
they missed out on the opportunity to put in the patent, making the disk from tightly packed nylon or polymer filament, so that it unravels if you watch it a 2nd time, like cassettes sometimes did haha
honestly I like that they patented pretty much every way to make a self destructing disks so that no one, not even if they wanted to, could make something so useless as a self destructing disk
I seen something similar to this earlier at my local Goodwill store. There was 5 DVDs that had a price on the back on rental fees. I didn't bother looking at the disc but I feel it's the same thing. They were different from the one you featured in this video. The cardboard cases were just that. Thin cardboard DVD cases.
A lot of rental stores used stripped down versions that did not include special features and such that were included on the retail discs. These are usually clearly marked as rental versions and are more likely to be what you found than the type of disc this video was about.
I remember these during the 2nd wave, they were a hot item at truck stops. Truck drivers were the “business traveler” mentioned in this video. Back in the 2000’s almost every truck driver had a portal DVD player in their truck. For that market Flexplay was actually a good product.
0:34 I actually used to like Redbox, but I’m kind of sad that they closed down. I didn’t really think it would be a hassle about going to your Redbox kiosk, logging in, selecting a DVD or Blu-ray, and then the kiosk will eject the DVD or Blu-ray disc that you got and if you selected multiple, it would actually eject all of them one at a time and then once you were done with it, you went back and you selected return disc and then you insert the disc back into the kiosk and it would just take it and I actually found that the part where the kiosk gives you and takes back the disc was really satisfying so that’s why I’m kind of sad
This seems perfect for companies to send out data securely (relatively) or for award shows to send out pre-release (screeners) DVDs to people to watch and then rate for awards. Shame they didn't approach it from a security sense.
One missing aspects of the Flexplay attempted resurrection was Love's. For the unfamiliar, this is a truck stop. The "business travellers" in this equation are truck drivers. While Love's does still have an extensive DVD sales selection for their off-grid trucker patrons, returning a Flexplay disc for recycling would NOT have been an inconvenience since OTR drivers are VERY fuel brand loyal since truck stops reward such things and the parent company of most trucks work out special deals for buying ghastly amounts of fuel every month. So, I pick it up at a Love's in Indiana & recycle at my next Love's fuel stop in Nebraska. What's inconvenient about that?
I thought it was basically a good idea for everyone, because you don't have to return it in a specific time-frame, unlike rentals which were a pain, and could be expensive when you were late. With FlexPlay you could accumulate dozens over a year, and keep them in a bin to return when convenient. So, I'm not as scathing as the author of the video is. You make a good point about them being particularly useful for truck drivers.
everything from 2:40 on is hilarious! Your humor and sarcasm is top choice mate! the cuts used ( and then you cut and you're not sitting there) -- i just love it. ive literally watches that section up until you get up to see the tv 4 times.
Fun fact: All optical media does actually have a _shelf life_ in the sense that the data therein will be too corrupted to read successfully. DVD-R's for example live from 30 to 100 years depending on initial B.o.M. and storage conditions. Pedantry warrior out~
@@NWinnVR Not necessarily, Mitsui MAM-A recordables are rated for 250+ years. Engineering considerations include oxidation of reflective layer, decomposition of adhesives, galvanic reactions between layers, reactions with environmental contaminants or UV light. With suitable materials and storage I don't see why certain discs couldn't theoretically last thousands of years. But I don't think anyone is going to spend that R&D money on 12cm discs now that we have holographic data crystals (HDSS et. al.) for higher density long term offline archival, so I guess your point still stands
There's also Verbatim's M-DISC which uses an "inorganic write layer", basically burning holes in the disc. It has a projected lifetime of "several hundred years".
You just stole my joke, you iron curtain nasty spy. If my "Back to the Future" flexplay DVDs weren't void, I would use them to travel in time and place the comment before you.
This just demonstrates how desperate consumers were to have a cheap rental- that COULDN'T have large late fee's. Flexplay had an idea, DIVX had an idea, Redbox had an idea, and Netflix had an idea. Two won, two lost.
@@hoppinglark it was just an new idea to make money , simple as this , no crisis about late fee . we were a lot that were capable to return movie at time . can you imagine in my youth a movie rental was only 24h then later 48h and finaly 72h before video rental almost died ....and then this format was great idea for the road travelers that cant bring back a rental in 48h ....or when taking a plane for a travel , usualy travelers take at least 1 week so....and i can go on and on ....but desperates consumers as a reason , damn you had to much fee to pay you just had to go over the street to the other video store and start that $?*& all over again and again and again and not paying fee , and when a video store was closing you could go rent ps1 game a week before they closed and never bring back your rent ( keep the game yup ) and no agency were comming after you for the $$$ . in the end it s just that i dont agree with your statement ^^
@@lacroix1976 I guess your perception is different than mine. I knew families who would ,from time to time, misplace a movie from Blockbuster and have a huge late fee.
@@Obi-WanKannabis Note my use of the word "simple equipment" By this I mean no more than something as simple as an HDMI capture with a single plug in, if even that. Software may suffice in some situations. I would not consider VHS or DVD recorders as simple, given their size and cost during their prominence.
@@starlight4649 Their operation (from memory, I was young at the tail end of VHS prominence) was simple enough, my old nan has (yes still has them) 1000s of recorded VHS tapes from TV and rented VHS.
Some madlad here in the comments section said he bought several of them to see if he could copy the disc contents to a computer before they oxidized. It was.
@@liamjames-hendriks4895 exactly. @HighKing obviously has no practical knowledge of how easily it could be accomplished in the heyday of VHS. In fact, the limited choices of inputs and sources actually helped in that regard.
I mentioned the tragedy of the commons a couple of times in this video. This is an old but (in my opinion) underutilized term for the concept of what happens when shared resources are used by individuals acting in their own best interest. Although the term is flawed and some situations are far more complex than can be explained in four easy words, it’s a useful reminder that things that seem harmless on an individual level can scale in ways we can’t grasp. If you’d like to learn a little more about this concept, check out this website I found; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Why not use the correct term and then explain it?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Because TotC is more eloquent and specific to the aspect of resource depletion.
That's a really neat website! Thanks for telling me about it! Seems to have a lot of really informative articles! That are editable by the common people! It's almost like a recursive example of TotC itself!
Technology Connections Respect the consumers
@@unusefulidiot externalities is an economic concept and focuses on the fact that they exist and what problem that causes to try and make a tangeable cost benefit analysis. Whereas the tragedy of the commons is what it is called in environmental science and is what is actually being discussed in the video the environment and the lower efficiency and waste produced over another product. Something externalities does not look at as it is focused on one product itself rather than alternatives and greater societal good.
I remember buying a couple of these just to see if it was possible to rip them to the computer before the disc oxidized. It was.
Jerry Shugars legend
awesome
Brilliant
and so even their greedy "if I can't have it, NOBODY CAN" idea for this failed as well...
Wondering the same. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
They were so proud of the concept that they made the company self-destruct as well.
They used a chemical compound to destroy all their employees and management.
@@gabrield.4276 I see 0 errors throughout this comment and any of its replies where "they" is the proper correction.
They put that in the patent too.
😂😂😂😂👌
@@gabrield.4276 so as well as a idiot you're also correct people's grammar over UA-cam eh ? Your life must be great
The flexplay patent basically made it impossible for other companies to try the same thing, so at least we can thank them for that.
Plus it wouldn’t make sense today, with Redbox and digital rentals.... (I’d imagine those would’ve eaten this things lunch eventually)
don't believe they received multiple patients except for what was actually " designed, prototyped & tested ". . . . . . . . . & ya don't get an exclusive patent for " Vaperware ".
@@robozstarrr8930 At one time you had to prove something worked to get a patent. But that requirement disappeared a long time ago. Which has created a mess from people who thought of an idea claiming rights to someone who did all the effort in making it work.
@@russellhltn1396 really, that's sad...did some patients in the 90's and we had to have a proof of concept /schematic/documentation/prototype ( that worked ). all i recall later were the renewal cost went sky high . . but if's thats the case shortly i'm gonna submit anti-gravity, backwards time travel ( at the speed of dark ) and HS dark skin gurls with short white hair, freckles and tan lines . . (cause that's my jam!)
@@robozstarrr8930 If anyone actually invented time travel, they'd simply go back to before you submitted your patent and submit it first.
I remember my dad talking about these. They were very popular with long-haul truck drivers. You could get these things at the major truck stops, watch the movie in the off time, then toss it. Most truckers had a portable TV/DVD, but not a ton of space to store movies. And since many places, especially in the Midwest, didnt have Redbox yet, it could be hard to return a rented disk on time.
Another perk was a trucker could buy these disks on the company account while buying other work supplies at the truck stops or even pay with cash. If a driver wanted to use Redbox, they woud have to use their own personal credit card.
So, I guess the Flexplay system did "work", but only for a relatively small market. Of course, when truckers started using Wi-Fi or smart phones, there was no need to use disks at all.
disposable DVD's thank God it failed can you imagine the amount of ruined DVD's in the landfills had it taken off?
You prune
DVDs will always be better than WiFi Video watching
@@stephensnell5707
Right except dvds are impossible to play and really hard to sit down with a dvd player in the car when phones are 10x smaller and more convient?
Youre bad at this.
@@artsyscrub3226guy saw the David lynch watching movies on your phone video and took it to heart.
@@stephensnell5707 Considering you're the one "valiantly" defending the honor of DVDs I'd say it'd be more accurate to say that you're the "prune".
Thankfully, they patented every conceivable way to make a aelf destructing disc, so nobody else can create such an abomination
A patented idea becomes open source after some years.
@@vipervidsgamingplus5723 Yeah, but it we're kinda past the era of renting DVD's.
There is a typo in the comment
@@vipervidsgamingplus5723 *Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Not open source, it becomes public domain.
Also not JUST after some years. It becomes public domain x years after you do not pay the maintenance fees. (4, 8, 12 years depending on the patent)
They can sell rights to patents, and businesses have no problem buying those rights if they think they can make money with them.
That red color does look really cool.
that's what I was thinking
600 likes and one reply? My spot
There are colorfied CD roms so neat
the disk does look like something darth vader would sell.
looks like fresh blood to me
Hearing "11 years ago" in reference to 2008 made my head hurt.
And 11 years before that, it was 1997!
I'm old!
Same
@name2 Subtract 1 and it's 1985, the release year of the savior of Video Games - Super Mario Bros.!
Getting old is when you have socks older that the person calling you an idiot on the internet.
I actually still have one I purchased from Staples, The Kite Runner. IT STILL WORKS! The disc has air gaps in the center that allows oxygen to slowly degrade the disc, BUT if you quickly apply superglue after opening to seal that gap.... no degradation! At the time this wasn't a mystery and info and methods were readily available online via forums. I only bought the disc for the challenge of making it permanent. I was an early Netflix and Blockbuster by Mail so even paying $5-6 to permanently own the disc wasn't that appealing because the selection was poor and I still had to drive TO the store to buy it.
bro found the bypass
so even Flexplay isn't immune to the way of the pirate 🏴☠️
@@joshc5613your comment is 100% factually true, but jesus christ does it hurt to call someone a pirate for modifying their own physical property.
@@joshc5613 And others here mentioned ripping FlexPlay DVDs to their computers. ...From which you could presumably burn a DVD±R copy if you wanted.
@@JoQeZzZ There's more than your own physical property at play, though. You have to consider the intellectual property aspect, and the terms of the rental license, which this is technically a violation of.
If they made a VHS version, would it be called Flextape?
They made something similar to VHS with a mechanism that slowly lowers a magnet towards the tape. I would pay for it if someone calls it flextape 😂
Hi Phill Swift here for Flextape
園田 I SAWED THIS BOAT IN HALF!
*THATS A LOTTA DAMAGE*
*pulls vhs out after it self-destructs
NOW THATS A LOTTA DAMAGE
Truck Driver here: these were cool, but kinda on the expensive side if I recall. They were great for us, as getting back into a place to return a DVD could never be guaranteed. Hence, the truck stops you mentioned them being in: captive audience. Except that audiobooks were cheaper, and in only a year or two, smart phones were available so these were much less useful.
I don't remember but was it possible to return BlockBuster movie anywhere in the country? Like Redbox?
@@Nexus9118 no
@@grandmoffpuppeteer Well, thought so.
@@Nexus9118 you could sometimes if you could convince the person at the counter, but I don't think it was an officially supported thing.
Truckers was the market I thought of, too (I have a friend who's been one for 20 years). Get the disk at the truck stop, watch it when you stop for the night or a break so you don't drive too many hours, and toss it. But it turns out that Netflix worked pretty well for that, too. My friend would get his three DVDs, take them on his trip, mail them from wherever, and have three more waiting for him when he got home.
There is something so horribly depressing about this, I can just picture a little kid buying Chrarrolets Web and not understanding why their favorite movie just stopped
😢😭
@@johnfoltz8183 no
Woah there, Satan!
@@danek_hren no
Yah I could see a completely ignorant parent (or Karen) buying this in a store and then flipping out about it no longer working because they didn't pay attention to the package.
One of the earliest "nightmares" I had as a kid involved me reading books that destroyed themselves after 1 reading, and video games that self-destructed after you beat them. This kind of shaped me into the non-wasteful person I am now. Learning just now that something dystopian like this actually existed, makes me sick to my stomach.
I remember hearing about a pvp game, I think it was called Yolo where if you die, you can't play the game anymore. Sounds dumb, and there was no chance that a game like that would keep a community.
Ngl, a premise where a kid keeps resetting thier favourite game and never beating it to stop this from happening would make a good premise for a creepy or at least sad film.
@@blakksheep736 i agree! why not make the video game characters a *bit* more self-aware after each reset? it could be little things changing, like some lines being a bit different (using different words/sentences instead of just going by the script) or the character(s) trying to outright talk to the player through the screen!
@@mioko5679 great idea. And halfway through the main character takes the kid aside to ask what's wrong, then it's revealed why he keeps resetting.
If we want a happy ending, we can then have the two work together to break the cycle, only for the kid to realise this means he will likely not ever see his favourite game again.
The movie ends with the hero comforting him, telling him its time to move onto other games, as well as the rest of his life. ❤
Are you in therapy?
Another problem: The consumer is much more likely to rent another movie if they have to return the first one, continuing the rental cycle.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “environmentalist pressure” was applied by the rental companies themselves.
That was my first thought exactly. I hate how cynical I’ve become but I immediately wondered “how could that have been to their advantage?”
Its so cute that you assume companies care about environment
@@kyarumomochi5146 Maybe you should read his comment again.
I honestly doubt it since the tech would require a business model that was inflexible due to having to buy a lot of overhead that might never sell while simply renting discs multiple times has more flexibility and can off-load the discs later when that many of the same title are no longer needed. What I mean is that even if the tech worked as advertised and they managed to get enough studios to give them licenses to make all of the popular movies, it'd actually cost more to run a video rental store with Flexplay movies than it would the traditional rental plan. The profit margin would be worse for stores selling Flexplay movies than it would if they simply stocked a handful of the popular movie titles to rent out repeatedly due to the fact the initial high cost of buying the actual DVDs would be offset by the ability to continually rent them until the discs wore out making them more money in the long run.
Flexplay, in my opinion, was simply not a threat to the video rental industry like streaming services and the Internet ended up being.
Thus creating a self sustaining economy
Talking about self-destructive media storage, Hideo Kojima (that Metal Gear daddy) once thought of using this kind of CD when developing Metal Gear Solid. He said if Snake died, the PlayStation disc would be permanently unusable. Good thing this tech never took off.
Okay, but that would be funny
You don't need that disk to do this. You can burn the dead flag at the free space of the disk and refuse to run if the flag is there.
That would piss a lot of people off. I'd never fw hideo again if he did that shit.
Thats the most Kojima shit I've ever heard
@@talkysassis Oh yeah how dare Hideo Kojima not think of think of that when making Metal Gear Solid in *1996.*
Watching Mission Impossible. "This DVD will self destruct in 10 seconds"
Underrated post.
Lol why didn't I think of this?
Or Inspector Gadget
I believe there's a patent for that...
Tim Lewis what if your DVD player explodes along with the disc
Surprisingly Redbox is still popular. The one at the grocery store I work at has people standing in front of it all day. I'm glad disc rentals haven't fully died out. Watching my mom come home from work with a Redbox disc in her hand was always an awesome treat and I always got excited to see what new movie we would be watching.
I miss going to the video store. Sure, nowadays I can watch anything I want with just a few clicks, but it's just not the same. I'm glad I at least got to experience it though. I got to be a kid during the video rental heyday, and it was awesome!
I'm guessing they weren't very fun if it was your mom™ that did the choosing
@@pensacolian211It feels so much harder to discover stuff now that's not curated for you
Love red box. Once and a while they even sell me on a cheap buy
And renting video games!@@pensacolian211
I'm old enough to remember getting fined for bringing a VHS back to Block Buster without first rewinding it.
Congrats
What was the fine/
@@WanderingBrushArt 6 months in federal prison usually
Be kind, rewind
@@RustyShacklefordReal Damn, beat me to saying it :)
Tested one of these back in the day by leaving it constantly running in a DVD player. After about a day and a half the image began to get scambled and it was unplayable within an hour
Potententialy, you filmed it
@@lgasc ?
@@mazda9624 Apparently you did not
@@lgasc that is, like, piracy or something
@@lgasc I'm not sure if you're aware but we didn't have phones with decent cameras until a decade ago... Camcorders weren't common either.
The jokes on them. I store my DVD player in an airtight box filled with nitrogen.
good job brack
@@Fable1Guides Brak*
Pro gamer tip
*Zorak blinks
Michael O smart man!
"You will own nothing and be happy"
This DVD concept was ahead of its time
Agreed!
very kosher
Streaming 😢😢😢
The DVD WEF wishes on the 99%.
I will pay nothing and I will be happy.
Man, companies always finding ways to make you not own anything.
Some things just don't change over time, do they?
@@letcreate123 yes red dvds change over time to black dvds :)
@@WoodlandChill Thanks to capitalism and corporatism that'll be a thing though. Welcome to the 5g control grid where we own nothing.
You know your name can have a very fishy meaning, right?
*google stadia intensifies*
It's probably a good thing the patent included so many different ideas for self-destructing discs. Imagine the waste if people kept trying to make the idea stick and one of them did.
The patent only protects what's written in the patent's claims. Those are usually a lot less expansive than the written description, since you have to actually make it work before you can claim it.
Not how patents work.
It’s really not the worst idea I’ve ever heard of, it just sounds dystopian but definitely has a purpose. Older people who only use physical or you know someone without cable or internet maybe taking a trip to a cabin etc. I’d wager it might even be less wasteful than some trips back to return a dvd in person. Pretty niche tho lol
There is nothing wrong with the U.S. patent system :) /s
@@monhi64 ewaste that can be easily avoided does not have a purpose beyond creating waste.
The irony is that the local supermarket has an endcap loaded with regular DVDs costing $2.99-$7.99 each -- none of which will commit suicide after 48 hours. :-)
And some good ones, to boot.
Lol!😂
Though in some cases, the DVD has seemingly already committed suicide before you buy it.
Blu-rays, even.
Or get a pirated DVD for a buck, it'd last a lot more. Piracy offered a lot of advantages back then.
Back in college, I bought one of these from Staples. I used my DVD player drive and copied it. I still have the video file even though the disc has been long gone for 15 years.
Ez-d doesn't sound like easy dvds at all
It actually sounds like a male escort service...
affordable-d
XD
Hangs around for a few days then is gone, sounds about right.
@@bojangles2492 A few *days*? Geez, who has that much stamina?
@@450AHX An EZ-D, that's who
@@danielle5160 need me some easy d's
I'm a risky man. I'd watch Mission Impossible on those, two hours before expiration.
"Mission: Impossible" actually featured a view-once video tape (at the end; Smoke emanated from the tape).
It would be easy to implement. For example, you could have a battery in the gap in one corner of the tape, other electrical components (mainly a capacitor) in another corner, and an explosive that can be detonated by an electric current (RDX would work work well, as long noone drops the tape) between the reels in the middle. Then there would be two electrodes (maybe metal wheels) in contact with the tape at one point, and a piece of the tape at the end replaced with aluminium foil (to make an electrical connection between the electrodes when that point is reached).
Of course, people might complain if it blew up their whole room, or you might lose repeat business if customers were killed by the shrapnel of the video recorder.
You could make an incendiary version (more like the film) by putting vials of potassium permanganate and glycerol in the gaps between the reels, with a mechanism to open a door between them (to cause them to mix).
@@johnbernardlambe8582 just to be safe we should put you on the no-fly list and ban you from coming within 500 yards of a chemical lab.
@@alt8791 You kidding? Airlift this dudes DVDs to North Korea and watch the hilarity that ensues
@@Rebellions bold of you to assume they know DVDs
@@foxtrot1962 They know and use DVDs well. However it is a taboo to watch foreign DVDs in North Korea, but most citizens do it anyway. Most are smuggled from China or sent by South Koreans via balloon, along with post cards, diskettes, hand written notes, drawings, posters and etc., as a campaign to educate, inform, show love, and piss off North Koreans.
That disc packaging is like software that has the user license inside the package that states "By opening this package you agree to the Terms and Service."
Or the E U L A.
Although in that case (as in the case of most EULA) it would be legally unenforceable
@@georgeparkins777 most Eulas are probably unenforcible
@@maxcorrice9499 that's what I said
@@georgeparkins777 No you said they'd be unenforceable. He said they'd be unenforcible.
In the late 90s my mom got really into doing online surveys and stuff to earn gift cards and what not, and I remember one company who would mail us VHS tapes to react to, but they were single use. Once you played the tape, it would destroy itself. I was always curious about how that worked.
Another commenter down here brought up the name One-View, idk if thats what you're looking for
Propably a scratcher inside the box destroying the tape as it plays or the ‘wheel’ inside snaps at the end of the playing
The Failure of Flexplay is one of the few indicators, that we do not infact live in the darkest timeline.
The fact that my own imagination scares me more than reality does is what confirmed that for me.🤣
True, but the fact that it exists at all supports my personal favorite argument that we live in the most ridiculous one.
@@MrBrightcide For me, it's an indication that we live in the most hypocritical one. Let's be honest, the Flexplay people didn't expect anyone to come back to the store to recycle the discs, they bet on people buying the discs and tossing them out with their household trash without caring about the environmental impact. But the concept was so wasteful that even Joe Public found it a tad harsh on the environment.
PS: I think some people boycotted Flexplay as a retroactive middle-finger to all those useless unsolicited AOL CDs they had received in the mail through the previous years.
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ This was clearly about money
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ Except DVDs arent gonna destroy the environment.
Your being just as ridiculous here
Me: "Mom, can we watch Charlotte's Web?"
Mom: "Sorry honey, it expired last week."
We have charlottes web at home.
The copy of charlottes web at home
@@ashspades5307Great way to make a comment less original!
Get a better movie, like a Restricted horror movie
LOL I've seen your pfp before, feels weird seeing it here
Nice one lol😂😂
Disposable DVD what a nice way to produce huge amount of plastic waste.
kapitanbomba1989 in comes keurig, hold my coffee cup.
*cough* like plastic water bottle *chough*
Disposable bottles what a way to produce huge amounts of plastic waste
less disposable things
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Interestingly enough, growing up in western Pennsylvania, the best video rental store was a sub-store inside Giant Eagle grocery stores. The “Iggle Video” stores severely cut into blockbuster’s business in the area, especially since you could grab the movie while getting groceries, and the rental terms were usually long enough that it was convenient to drop it off next week when you needed more groceries, and Iggle was just closer to the neighborhood, usually, also.
Western PA gang represent!!
@@CelesteWuff Ah yes, the Dirty Bird, where the floors are mopped once a year whether they need it or not
Gian Iggle
Thank goodness this flopped. What a horribly wasteful idea.
Disc is a beautiful shade of red, though.
Incidentally, I've got a 2005 Capcom promotional DVD with various trailers of upcoming title (from the Tokyo Game Show) that was a similar colour.
i know that would have been soooooooo wasteful
Lady Brightcynder I agree it’s wasteful but at least it is something that’s useful and can be recycled. It’s crazy to think how many products are sold every day who’s packaging contains more plastic than that disc does and the majority of the time it just gets tossed out.
Saves the fuel required to return a disc though.
And then including *more* material to mail it back, requiring more of the disgusting diesel fumes from the mail lorry.
Imagine having a DVD that expires before the soup in your pantry.
If it's canned soup then I'm not sure the majority of DVD's won't. Millitary canned rations from the korean war were still edible from what I read a few years back. :P
Robert Phoenix You should watch Steve 1989. He once ate canned beef from the 1890s.
imagine having a teemo pfp
Imagine *dying*
@@helenwhs Spoiler : It wasnt edible cuz the air seeped in and it was just dirt
The rental model worked quite well because upon return, usually the consumer would rent another one on impulse.
That's not really true, as almost every rental store had the drop box just inside the front door and some form of external drop slot for when they were closed. While some folks might decide to rent another movie while they were there, stopping in front of the door while a kid shoved the movies in the slot was more common. Granted I didn't spend long hours working in a video rental store, but people watching while waiting for my girlfriend/fiancé/wife to pick out movies over the years showed me that the vast majority of people returning movies never entered past the drop box and the vast majority of people renting movies didn't drop any off as they came in.
@@andrewapplegarth334 The video rental market was largely founded on the idea of returns generating more rentals and sustained multiple national chains before digital services displaced them. As a counterpoint I guess we do have you sitting in a car prepping recall bias
@@MegaZeta That's a cool buzz word to try and justify ignoring observational data. Better luck next time...
That's why I used the drop box even if they were open lol
@@andrewapplegarth334 Not that this weird self-destruct DVDs ever crossed the pond, but I don't think rental stores had such boxes over here.
Not that I used them much, but AFAIK they wanted to see the media being returned to check for scratches and misplaced disks/cassettes.
It's hard to say if this is more or less dystopian than the modern streaming subscription model. Nowadays your license to view a movie you enjoy can be revoked at any given time with no warning, and I have to imagine the massive servers have an environmental impact as well
Not only that, but someone other than you or even the people who made the media can censor the media.
And because of that, movie piracy has pretty much come back. Netflix, much like Spotify, almost killed piracy in their own segments when they arrived but now that every movie studio wants their own pies instead of sharing it like music streaming services do a lot of people went back to downloading.
@@MaaZeus thats what I did!
Also they can edit their content at any time (to comply with the latest fashions in politics, for example, or because a government forced them to) and you'll never be able to watch the old version or even know for sure that it was changed. Soon this can be done with AI deepfakes so that it is possible to "re-shoot" a scene with different dialogue and action, without the participation or consent of anyone involved in the original production.
I think those who archive digital media (legally or not) are doing a great service -- they ensure that people in the future will be able to watch what we watch, and understand our own era better, as it really was and not as the censors of the future want it to have been.
Literally everything has an environment impact
I think that red color is gorgeous.
Agreed
Me too
me three.
Me four
@@EssexAggiegrad2011 Me forty-six, but I agree :P
To show you the power of Flexplay, I sawed the movie rental industry in half!
*_IT EVEN WORKS UNDERWATER_*
NOT VERY TOUGH
You win the comments section
Technicality Whoaa you're the man from that one Braille Skateboard video
Shoulda saw that coming
The tiny moments that kept dystopia dialed down. Imagine if in addition to region locks and DRM, companies could destroy your DVD remotely.
Everything is digital now, you just lease everything you pay for online. If your account gets banned or the service goes down, you lose everything. You don't own anything in the digital age.
@@Teh_Random_Canadian Everyone knows lol, people pay $5 for streaming services because they want to watch some stuff on the go, they don't care about "owning" movies or shows. If they did they'd just buy the DVD and then copy it
@@Teh_Random_Canadian yarr harr if you ask me
sort of like how buying original cartridges to legally rip them for emulators is something some people do. Just a thought
@@gamespender8605 I get that, if you follow the law by the letter then sure. The money you use to buy a hard copy so you can play on a emulator isn't going to the developer anyways, just a third party.
What I mean is if for some reason steam goes offline in a few years there would be billions of dollars worth of purchased games that people would no longer would be able to access
@@Teh_Random_Canadian In all fairness many steam libraries simply dwarf what would be possible with physical disks. Most people simply don't have the room for thousands or even just hundreds of games. As long as the game is physically installed to your pc and is playable offline, you'll be able to play it for as long as you have it installed.
Ah, I remember these. I remember reading about them before they came out and hating the idea immediately. So much waste, so much greed, so much pointlessness when other solutions (video rentals, especially) already existed. I was very pleased to find that most of humanity agreed with me, and this stupid product failed hard.
I just imagine someone taking that special someone out for dinner and then coming home for a movie blowing the dust off of the plastic wrap and being like "I've been saving this for just the right special occasion" smelling the freshly open dvd and being like "ah yes this was a good year." popping it in and being like "damn why isn't it working?!" And the whole night is ruined because they didn't print the best by date on the outside of the package smh
Like saving a condom lol, at least those don’t destroy themselves after 48 hours, that’d be awkward.
@@DisDatK9 48hrs!? Most of us would be happy to get a couple minutes out of them!
@@liambergstrom8183
Oh, dear God! Think of the chafing!
😬
Show off!
If it were that special, you would buy the full dvd, not a 2 dollar rental.
Can't even express your displeasure in a strongly worded email because the company no longer exists.
There was a VHS version of this in the early 90s. It would self erase itself with the mechanism that would slowly lower a magnet onto the video tape as you watch it after five times. Needless to say it didn't work well when they realize people can just open up the video tape and remove the magnets.
As if vhs can survive for long anyway, it's good we got rid of tapes
@@Journey_to_who_knows yeah I remember leaving one on my dash back in the Blockbuster days and it literally melted!
Never underestimate a heated car
dam i was looking for this comment and found it...thanx. i remember this also and thought it was stupid.
Yeah I got one of those once; it had some kind of STUPID promotional thing on it, nothing worth watching. Took me about 30 seconds (because it said on the package it would erase itself after one watching) to find the magnet and remove it, and then tape over the stupid promotional with something else.
“This message will self destruct in...”
I want every mission impossible dvd rental to do this.
Fearghus Keitz It has to start smoking like an FRH or explode, then it will be the best.
kabob 007 exactly!
Fearghus Keitz Also it has to hiss when you open the packaging.
Y E S
THIS IS THE PERFECT IDEA
And a fingerprint sensor
The problem I have with the proposal that streaming is worse environmentally is that you also have to *ship* the DVDs everywhere, and it's a lot easier to solar/wind power a data center than to make a delivery fleet that doesn't burn dinosaurs.
There are a lot of rare metals and other environmentally troublesome materials in server rooms. Same is true of electric vehicles. They're not identical, but I'd struggle to say one is meaningfully better.
@@timothymclean Most of the rare metals in tech can be recycled repeatedly. Unlike plastic discs that can not be recycled back into disks.
*opens disc*
Flexplay: "I have decided that I want to die."
THAT'S A LOTTA depression
Gauntlet Legends Narrator: Your Flexplay IS ABOUT TO DIEEE!
like flipping McAfee when the trial runs out
Flexplay was the true Charlotte all along.
Depending on the movie put on the disk maybe a good choice.
I could see this being useful for one purpose. The need to transfer information that is sensitive. Having a set period of time would limit the chances of other people using it to get that information.
That’s some mission impossible shit right there
"...as usual, in the event that you or your IM force be captured or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your organization. This disc will self-destruct in 48 hours, long after your mission is complete and the information becomes irrelevant anyway."
@@Harryw007
*_MI music start playing_*
@@craZivn I'd wager they can probably adjust the formula to have the disc destroy itself much faster. 48 hrs was the desired rental period, not a happy accident.
Mind if I use that in a spy story I'm writing?
I actually remember these things from long ago. We never rented them but I remember seeing them in stores. Also there’s an issue with DVD rental/single use DVD things. Once you buy/rent the DVD, throw it in your computer and rip the disk. You have successfully obtained the movie for less then it costs to buy it.
@Subaru Impreza Cool Impreza
@@razmann4k cool letter
@@mr.randomgamer888 cool waifu
@MinecraftDude 777 cool slime
@@razmann4k cool orange color on the letter R
I loled SO hard at the "open before 2009" on the inside of the sealed wrap! Another great early 2000's tech :)))
Of course I'm sort of biased, but I wish you'd talked about the chemistry going on in the disc. It's an absolutely fascinating (and really clever) process!
You know what? It honestly never crossed my mind to get into how this actually worked! I was more interested in exploring the rental angle and how pointless it was. And I suppose by the time I got through there the script was long enough that I just considered it done? I don't really know. Usually I am quite interested in getting into the nitty gritty like that but for whatever reason this time I just wasn't. Weird!
@@TechnologyConnections Maybe an excuse for a followup video?
@@daredaemon8878 Or an excuse to use that second channel lol
It looks simple enough. The Flexplay discs use a dye to store 1s and 0s. When the dye turns dark, the player just sees a bunch of 1s on the disc. - It’s similar to how CD+Rs gradually die with age (the recording dye darkens & becomes unreadable).
the dye used is methylene blue, a medication that causes blue eyes and urine
With regards to electricity usage of streaming services:
Amount-wise, they _might_ be as bad as disposable rentals. BUT, the difference is that pollution from electricity generation is *centralized* and thus easier to manage/regulate/enforce. With disposable rentals, the pollution will be dispersed through millions of households, whose regulation-compliance definitely vary across the spectrum and likely not practically enforceable.
Not to mention the additional energy -- thus pollution -- required to deliver the disabled discs to a recycling point.
So considering all factors, streaming services at the end is likely to be less negatively-impacting the Earth than disposable rentals.
Also, playing the DVD requires electricity anyways.
Also playing dvds requires electricity and if all the grids were nationalised or internationalised respectively we could have an entirely clean energy grid if some stubborn mules didnt pay people to scream WHAT ARE YOU DOING! In the us and in other countries people cared
And Energy production changes over time while the disk will always be made of the same material
I made the same argument regarding electric cars. Someone was saying that all they do is move the pollution to the power plant. Even if the amount of pollution turned out to be the same, there are maybe tens of thousands of power plants worldwide and they're all managed by governments or large companies, as opposed to billions of cars in the hands of individuals. Power plants can be better located, and they're much easier to control, maintain, and upgrade/replace with something more efficient.
I'm not sure if this is pointing at the "streaming an episode on Netflix is as bad as driving 4 miles" myth, but that myth can actually be debunked by calculating a few things from first principles. You can look at the average CO2 pollution from a car, and look at how much the energy costs that can be generated for that much pollution. If you take a common bitrate for video, you can calculate how much energy (and cost) per MB you'd use according to the claim. Turns out, it's orders of magnitude more expensive than even normal home internet connections, not to mention your actual subscription cost to Netflix. The ISPs between you and the servers could not be running a profit (by orders of magnitude) if they were using enough energy to stream that episode to you, to match the exhaust of a car driving multiple miles. That's the bottom-up approach. You can also look at the data that goes through the large internet exchanges, multiply that by the emissions per GB you'd get from that claim, and you'll end up with equally ridiculous numbers. That's the top down approach.
The final part of debunking this claim is the energy usage of the servers at Netflix. There you can look at a Raspberry Pi, which can easily stream 4K HDR video files at the bitrates Netflix uses, as long as you're not transcoding (which doesn't happen on the fly at Netflix either). That Raspberry Pi only uses a couple Watts (+ a couple more for the hard drive) to do so, and can easily handle multiple streams. The energy the Raspberry Pi uses while streaming an episode is absolutely tiny compared to even starting the engine of your car (let alone drive around). Given that power usage and cooling are typically the largest costs of running a datacenter, Netflix will at least match the efficiency of this setup (otherwise, it would make economic sense to fill datacenters with Raspberry Pis...).
I did the actual calculations a while back in a Reddit comment, I can provide a link if anyone is interested. Either way , when push comes to shove. Your TV or even laptop is going to be the vast majority of the power usage you cause when watching Netflix or any other streaming platform. Watching a DVD/Bluray vs streaming really doesn't impact your CO2 footprint by a lot. The emissions caused by the manufacturing and supply chains for the DVDs in an average 2005 person's collection probably is already much worse than decades of regular streaming will cause through datacenter and infrastructure energy usage...
Another point against this format that you don't mention: specifically for childrens' titles, like the example disc you have: childrens' titles are much more likely to be watched over and over again multiple times. When kids get a movie they like, they tend to watch it over and over. So Flexplay partnering with specifically Disney makes even less sense.
@Tom R If the parents have any brains, they'll buy a permanent copy.
@@jpdemer5 Next move would be to get permanent copies banned.
@@jpdemer5 they probably prey on ignorance
“Ban permanent copies” sounds like the videogame model. I have tons of PS1/2 discs but I cannot play them on PS5. They have to be repurchased through the online service .
@@tabchanzero8229 No, don't give them ideas!
Here's an idea they overlooked:
Issue a container that is large enough for 30 disks, to all customers on first rental.
Once a customer has filled the container with used disks, they can return it, and in return get a free rental of their choice.
Not only do you then encourage the customer to return the disks for recycling, you save the customer the hassle of doing it after every rental.
Buy Flexplay disc. Copy disc to regular DVD.
Enjoy indefinitely.
I did the same--still have my quite playable DVD-R copies to this date. :)
I never really thought about whether DVDs were easy to copy or not. All the stuff I've read about encryption schemes had to do with preventing them from being ripped to an MPEG file, since by that point online piracy had long since supplanted concerns of people taking advantage of their local rental chain.
CloneDVD was one of the most popular ones back then.
Pocket Fluff Productions My uncle practically had a side business selling burned DVDs. He’d print the covers for the cases and the dvd themselves and had flyers of new movies coming out and he sold them for just a few bucks. I’m not sure he really made much money doing it, I think he just did it for something to do and it was mostly just to family and friends. I think I just recently threw away a box of DVDs I had from that time. Other than the case being a bit thinner they looked just like what you’d buy in the store.
He just passed away so I suppose that FBI warning no longer really applies.
Still doing it... round about with capture and netflix/hbogo.
As for disk copy protection, for the most part it's a joke. There are disks that are hard to crack, but any quality software can force through. To date I've only run into 2 disks I couldn't rip to my Plex server from my collection; Expendables 2 and 3.
No sane person would ever return a copy of Shrek 2.
Yeah I still have mine 👌
why not?
Some
I buyed all of the copies of shrek 2 in a store and threw them off a cliffside. I SENT EM TO SHREKVEN.
No sane person would rent a copy of Shrek 2, They buy a copy
The movie industry finally found a solution to the problem: Simply make movies that noone would wanna watch twice!
*Cough* rim shot *Cough*
Disney already did that when they made The Last Jedi.
The funny thing is, that's exactly what I used to do with DVDs. I would go watch the movie in the theater, then dutifully buy the DVD when it came out and then never watch it.
This is funnier than it should be. Made me lolirl
@@acidphaze And still it make over billions dollars, just saying...
There was actually an attempt to market a self-destructing VHS format. I think it was called One-View. The tape would somehow erase itself as you watched it. Not sure if the resulting blank tape could be reused for recording or not.
I have a faint memory that inside that cassette was a gear that destroyed the tape when it was played.
The tape wouldn't erase itself while watching. They were set up to erase all content when the tape was rewound. You could watch the tape once, but if you tried to rewind it and watch again, all you got was static.
In the mid 90s, I was in a focus group for one of the major TV stations. I would get one of these stupid tapes every few weeks to preview new shows, mostly pilots.
No, you couldn't record onto the tape afterwards. I'm not sure how it worked.
Wow, it was the pioneer of the "view once" featured on many messenger apps
@@ShannonRice-hc2kr A bulk-eraser magnet that swung into place when the tape was pulled the other way to rewind, maybe? Or else what @notpublic5159 said.
And I'll bet _some_ people out there opened these up and defeated the destructive mechanism. Or moved the reels to a regular cassette's shell _before_ rewinding.
800 million flex disk in the trash?AOL said "hold my beer".
joseph fulks I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where Flexplay got the idea.
I remember when AOL was on floppy, at least you had free reusable disks, then they switched to CDs and you had drink coasters and landfill.
I think AOL sent me, personally, at least 800 million discs...
Now that's funny
@@grandetaco4416 At least one of them they sent to me actually came in a fancy metal tin (like an Altoids one, but bigger and thinner). I was impressed, but I already had AOL at the time.
I like how in the US people were constantly thinking about creating a service that lets people rent movies cheaper and more convenient way, while in Russia people were constantly thinking about how to make their torrent trackers become more reliable and accessable for everyone who wants to illeagaly download a movie and watch it.
Wow, a Communist country didn't care about the property rights of others? What a shock.
@@VideoArchiveGuy Now obviously this was the New Russia where the CPRF isn't all that popular.
@@VideoArchiveGuy
>Torrent trackers: invented and popularized in the late 90s and early 2000s
>Communist regime in Russia: ended in the mid to late 80s
@@augustovasconcellos7173 You don't actually believe the current Russian government isn't communist, do you?
@@VideoArchiveGuy they're Russian they probably fall for all the bullshit their government tells them the same way most Americans do
It probably would have been more popular if you could eat the DVD afterwards
+
-
Lol that would've been weird
×
x^y
I remember walking through an airport terminal and seeing a kiosk that was renting DVDs along with portable players. I don’t know if the DVDs were destructible, but the DVD players certainly weren’t, so you’d have to return something (again, negating the self-destruct feature).
Weren't users supposed to return the players and discs before boarding their flights by any chance ?
(Therefore renting and returning the stuff at the same airport)
“I’ll take 600!”
(The rental person hands over two copies of the film _300_ .)
Alright I'll take two to make 600
I'll take bad puns for 300 Alex.
OOOOOH, Daily Double.
Clerk gives you 12655723162254307425418678245150829297671403862274660768187828858528140823147351237817802795619571074765208532598060224803240903782164769430795025578054271906283387643826088448124626488332623608376164081221171179439885840257818732919037889603719186743943363062139593784473922231852782547619771723889252476871186000174697934549112845662596182308280390615184691924446215552586523740084932807259056238962104689731522587564412231618018774350801526839567367444928206231310973619440354723718012867753019556135721376207959558860559933052856914157120622980057169891912595926540427596853441276985006724869558201930657900240943007657817473684008944448183219124163017666607770667585082169598239230274035517738648065600492702095732843492708856036920219883363111527988109277392696562776813446645651238419301586157342867860646666350050113314787911320639668510871569846664873595017518995670958477806411667505346462590471136862647349666243426242677175204732314281064417939041868653741187423064985189556742640111598580035644021835576715752869397465453828584471291269955890393294448315746500268702149708808053100406398480942695623586049403348084970064668900206251516968479727515576425962392136269169089884609794271331061018895634421094082310408889752954265842691732460538911784960000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 disks.
Is two 300 or 300 and 300: rise of an empire
@@zacharybyford8200 Is that 600 factorial?
Never eat an expired DVD no matter how much your father insists it's fine.
It hasn't killed me yet.
I wanted to eat cereal and my dad sniffed it and said the milk was fine
I smelled the milk and goddamn it was sour
The blue flame _is not_ cold
Omg i thought this was just my father
I want to know the story behind this one
3:52 when the technology is so bad that even the DVD player is laughing at how bad it is
I'd go further than that, it sounded like Muttley snickering.
I laughed when the DVD player made a thunk whirring noise
lol I'm dead!
Well played, good sir or madam!
AnimeMangaViewer you know it’s bad when it’s a funai
the fun thing with these is that you could, if you had a home computer (most had CD drives at this time), burn it to your computer and have a permanent working digital copy.
Say whatever you want, but this is the perfect format for "Mission Imposible" movies.
lol
Or fight club. Fun fact: they actually replaced the Fight Club Blu Ray menu with a chick flick movie menu.
@@lucusthedreamer6426 i will wait for that
time to explode my comment
@@lucusthedreamer6426godamnit you damaged my replying comesaolFJDnsnflsnaklljndsknLk;SJFkjesDEFEds:F:LSF;fds..';.'][;];',;].;],;].,;;.[,;.][,---------------------
This needs to be taken down asap before EA finds this kind of product!
Disposable DLC
@@mags247 shhhhhhhh dont give them ideas
@@vojnov9885 Disposable games, forcing us into a diskless future
Delete this comment right GOD DAMN NOW!!!
Ea: yeah the vids up... Seems like an idea. Money??? Fuck ton. This one dude says disposable DLC.... Fucking great idea should hire him.... About to make millions. Let's go make this shit
Flexplay: Suicidal
Flextape: Immortal
So, just Flextape the Flexplay.
Immovable object vs unstoppable force
@@Known_as_The_Ghost Still slightly more effective than placebo.
@İlker Kesal even*
the good thing about their patent thingy is, if anyone had had that idea again in the 10 or so years until the patent runs out they wouldve had to pay that patent too in whatever way they wouldve made the selfdestrution of the dvd into reality. so they pretty much ensured it wouldnt be a problem ever again :D
Back in the 90's I was sent a VHS tape with a pilot episode for a sitcom that never came out. It was labeled as self destructing, so I took the tape apart before playing and found a magnet against the tape on the empty roll side. I was able to easily remove it and make it repayable lol. I wonder if its still at my moms house somewhere.
Not gonna lie, that's pretty dann cool. I get the feeling that tape is probably worth something to someone somewhere...
If you're interesed in uploading it online please tell the people at Lost Media Wiki.
At least you had a warning. Imagine if you'd watched it then after the end titles you were told it had self destructed! Also lucky you could unscrew it (though rivets can be drilled out like I've done when repairing tapes which have snapped off at the end)
@@Anythingoes88 I don't recall ever seeing rivets holding a VHS together. Not that I ever really looked for them, but it's the kind of thing I would notice If I saw it. I really wanna go look for that tape but the times are weird right now.
Could you please upload it
A disc that turns into landfill after a few days? What a brilliant idea! I'd rather go to Blockbuster instead.
that same prospect hasn't stopped K-Cups from taking off
@@polaris911 Because these are for rich people. And rich people don't stop spending money on bad ideas.
@@polaris911 agreed and there are plenty other wasteful products.
@@polaris911 Because K-Cups are food and not reusable.
@@griffin8062 There are reusable ones though...
Gotta love how he managed to futureproof for Disney+ when it was about half a year away!
Also, did Flexplay ever think about the obvious thing of just backing up the ISO file?
I mean that's the same issue as any rental dvd
@Game Plays 1230 thought the same, if one could rip it (which I was doing with xcopy back then) to your drive, the data should be the same no?
Considering LOTS of us were still completely capable of ripping... No, flexplay didn't think about anti-piracy in the slightest. They thought "A time limit's good enough"... AND clearly never ran into someone who'd take the first opportunity of viewing the thing to go ahead and rip it down... The quality's going to be better on most rippers if you play it normally anyway...
Actual technical efforts to counteract ripping would be implemented around or just after this point in time, but even that was slow to hit mainstream production, overly complicated in manufacturing means, and generally only a matter of time before some enterprising individuals would figure out "the work around" anyway...
Even today, nearly any form of security that's older than 3 months has already been hacked successfully. Older than a year, and there's likely a product somewhere for your home convenience of hacking it, cracking it, or fooling it on your own. ;o)
@@hannahranga yes but at least with rentals, you dont loose the investment of the original dvd and can just rent it to someone else. Most often people rented most movies once anyway.
Future proofing not looking so good with Disney+ hemorrhaging money right now.
Another reason no doubt movie rental stores in their heyday surely didn't want Flexplay, aside from making it so much easier for store outlets everywhere to compete with them.... is that it kept customers from coming back a 2nd time. And that second time often resulted in renting more movies, or at least seeing them.
Anyway this guys videos are well researched and interesting! good work
Even if it succeeded past these two trial periods I guarantee it would have been a PR nightmare.
How often do you read the interior of DVD/Bluray packaging? You probably don't. Now imaging being say, a parent thinking you just snagged a cheap DVD for you kid in a "dixie pack", you get home and let your kid watch it. Then a day later your kid wants to watch the movie again, they pop it in, then com running to you crying that the movie doesn't work anymore, especially since nowhere on the outside of the package did it mention that the DVD would self destruct.
It's perfect that it's round and metallic like a landmine because this thing would be a nightmare for anyone unfortunate enough to work in that customer service department, and probably a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Not to mention now you can get some pretty good bargain bin movies for five bucks a pop now anyway.
I really doubt they would have had PR backlash. The packaging is super-clear about what it is. I mean, the very top of the package says "No return DVD *rental.* " Not "sale." And the 2-day limit is mentioned on the front sidebar. Are there some aggressively stupid people out there who'd manage to miss all the copy? Probably. But it's hard to imagine them being sympathetic enough to create any kind of backlash. More likely they'd be mocked for their illiteracy.
@Jason Blalock A lot of PR disasters happen because of dumb people assuming things. Since when has intelligence been required to be a human with opinions?
And that's only if you live in a country that traditionally has a booming video rental market. In China you don't even have to pay anything for many movies if you are okay with ads and lower resolution (without membership most sites locks the 1080p option), and if you want the rest of the titles the price is as low as $2/mo for (almost) unlimited streaming. It's only when you want to archive the movie without doing shady acts that you need to pay more (and IIRC blu-rays are more expensive in China because of this).
@@jasonblalock4429
Are you really saying this when we live in a world where peanut packaging has to say "contains nuts" on it?
Nearest couple of places to me that have large 24 hour supermarkets(38-45 miles away), they sell pretty new releases of DVD's for £5 or less, and Blurays for £10 or less. Which makes some of the charges for VOD seem astronomical, take IT for example, I can get both the original IT(1990) and the new IT Part 1(2017) on DVD for £5 each, but on UA-cam, to rent the original IT, it's £3.49 for 48 hours(start within 30 days, watch within 48 hours of start) OR £9.99 to buy.
They thought I was crazy to fill my DVD player with nitrogen, but look who's laughing now!
You maniac
This was actually my first thought as well.
The voices aren't laughing now, now your the boss.
Plus nitrogen can be used as laughing gas so you can finally enjoy an Adam Sandler movie
You'll still expose the disc to oxygen between the package and the DVD player... At best, you'll slow down the decay of the disc, if at all
Can’t wait for flexplay2.0 when they make it so it blows up your DVD player after 48 hours
they missed out on the opportunity to put in the patent, making the disk from tightly packed nylon or polymer filament, so that it unravels if you watch it a 2nd time, like cassettes sometimes did haha
It would be destructive if you love watching dvds
thats what I thought this was when I clicked the video haha
@@pauls5745 would that potentially damage the DvD player
honestly I like that they patented pretty much every way to make a self destructing disks
so that no one, not even if they wanted to, could make something so useless as a self destructing disk
Broke: e-waste
Woke: *T E C H N O T R A S H*
Stroke: blood for the blood god
SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE
technoblade: you talkin bout _me?_
Technoblade fans: "write that down write that down!"
Dreams: *T E C H N O T R A S H*
Somewhere in a alternative dimension dystopia, the world is full of giant red piles of discs
AOL has you beat for over a decade
Instead of K-Cups? I'm curious which one is worst.
My favourite SCP
Wall-e
@@isaacroder3025 my immediate first thought. www.scp-wiki.net/scp-093
me and the homies running home before the charlotte's web dvd kills itself
I seen something similar to this earlier at my local Goodwill store. There was 5 DVDs that had a price on the back on rental fees. I didn't bother looking at the disc but I feel it's the same thing. They were different from the one you featured in this video. The cardboard cases were just that. Thin cardboard DVD cases.
A lot of rental stores used stripped down versions that did not include special features and such that were included on the retail discs. These are usually clearly marked as rental versions and are more likely to be what you found than the type of disc this video was about.
Rip probably was worth alot should always pick shit like that up could be a good little flip
the true injustice here is that your copy of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is badly scratched. You should take better care of such timeless classics!
he bought it at goodwill
@@jankristijan5889 no excuses
@@Subpar1224 It's crap anyway. The only reason you thought it was good, was because you were too young and stupid to know any better.
Dm So dummy boi
I remember these during the 2nd wave, they were a hot item at truck stops. Truck drivers were the “business traveler” mentioned in this video. Back in the 2000’s almost every truck driver had a portal DVD player in their truck. For that market Flexplay was actually a good product.
Use it till it breaks, then toss it out the window along with a Gatorade bottle full of piss.
@@Fsilone 😂
So do truck drivers just watch DVDs when driving…?
Ah well, back to hookers I guess.
Fsilone A pineapple Gatorade!
Casuals: "E-Waste"
Me, an Intellectual: "ｔｅｃｈｎｏｔｒａｓｈ ケ壱ま"
@D3lkatty same
*B U E N O*
@Sharkbyte399 it looks like an insult to all of the lucario fan community
And thats exacly why i love it
I love your comment, and your profile pic.
So vaporwave.
0:34 I actually used to like Redbox, but I’m kind of sad that they closed down. I didn’t really think it would be a hassle about going to your Redbox kiosk, logging in, selecting a DVD or Blu-ray, and then the kiosk will eject the DVD or Blu-ray disc that you got and if you selected multiple, it would actually eject all of them one at a time and then once you were done with it, you went back and you selected return disc and then you insert the disc back into the kiosk and it would just take it and I actually found that the part where the kiosk gives you and takes back the disc was really satisfying so that’s why I’m kind of sad
This seems perfect for companies to send out data securely (relatively) or for award shows to send out pre-release (screeners) DVDs to people to watch and then rate for awards. Shame they didn't approach it from a security sense.
You could probably just rip the DVD to your PC though.
@@lbsiuk it's a fair point
@@lbsiuk We've developed better anti-piracy technology for DVDs since then. Not perfect, obviously, much better than currently.
@@lbsiuk invent a new format that is just a little bit different than normal DVDs which will be impossible to rip with mainstream computers
@@hopelesslydull7588 So it was YOU was it? You'll pay for that! Get him!
This channel has such a retrofuturistic-with-hindsight aesthetic and I absolutely love that.
Louis Hypothetical true!!!
"revealing the corporate fuckery behind your made-up 90's nostalgia since 2014"
Even the outro music!
its like LGR, but for not games.
The subtle "It's back, how'd tha-" followed by him just continuing to speak at 8:58 made me laugh quite a bit for some reason.
His timing and tone was absolutely perfect, lol.
Him saying trying to be future proof there at the star is honestly dazzling seeing that he was right
The real death of the flex disc is when TMs switched to unlimited usage in Gen V.
It all makes sense now!
Jonathan Lee THIS is why I find old gens unplayable now. I’d really like to enjoy gen IV like I did before. 😢
@@rahimaakter1569 I never found it impossible to play these games, but it did make it much more convenient to reuse TMs
not that it matters, all you need to do is teach your starter surf and you instantly win the game
Alec Decowski Well, I guess Platinum is playable but I can’t stand not having the physical/special split in the older games.
One missing aspects of the Flexplay attempted resurrection was Love's. For the unfamiliar, this is a truck stop. The "business travellers" in this equation are truck drivers. While Love's does still have an extensive DVD sales selection for their off-grid trucker patrons, returning a Flexplay disc for recycling would NOT have been an inconvenience since OTR drivers are VERY fuel brand loyal since truck stops reward such things and the parent company of most trucks work out special deals for buying ghastly amounts of fuel every month. So, I pick it up at a Love's in Indiana & recycle at my next Love's fuel stop in Nebraska. What's inconvenient about that?
redbox
@@asdfoifhvjbkaos you get charged daily for Redbox and often as a truck driver you may not be at a stop that has a redbox.
I thought it was basically a good idea for everyone, because you don't have to return it in a specific time-frame, unlike rentals which were a pain, and could be expensive when you were late. With FlexPlay you could accumulate dozens over a year, and keep them in a bin to return when convenient. So, I'm not as scathing as the author of the video is.
You make a good point about them being particularly useful for truck drivers.
I usually don't like comments but when this one said 99 I knew I was the chosen one.
He mentions Love's in the video at 10:44.
“Use by 2009”
Aw, man. We were just a little bit off.
“Maybe it would’ve worked 11 years ago.”
I feel old.
Same
It’s because we all died in 2012
@Bloodblade07 *10 Years
everything from 2:40 on is hilarious! Your humor and sarcasm is top choice mate! the cuts used ( and then you cut and you're not sitting there) -- i just love it. ive literally watches that section up until you get up to see the tv 4 times.
Imagine if the disc destroys itself whilst you're still watching it haha
Yeah, don't even start it in the 47th hour... :D
BIG OOF
And it's a horror movie so you just think the glitching out is part of the movie.
Now I want to know what that would've looked like.
@@gnupfo Probably a couple of glitches, freezing and the director's cut straight to the DVD player's splash screen xD
"For best results Open By: April 2009"... I never thought a DVD like this could have an expiration date.
Fun fact: All optical media does actually have a _shelf life_ in the sense that the data therein will be too corrupted to read successfully. DVD-R's for example live from 30 to 100 years depending on initial B.o.M. and storage conditions.
Pedantry warrior out~
@@NWinnVR I was referring to the one he just opened. Not those DVDs that were used repeatedly.
Burned DVD have even less lifetime because the ink will be all oxidized eventually.
@@NWinnVR Not necessarily, Mitsui MAM-A recordables are rated for 250+ years. Engineering considerations include oxidation of reflective layer, decomposition of adhesives, galvanic reactions between layers, reactions with environmental contaminants or UV light. With suitable materials and storage I don't see why certain discs couldn't theoretically last thousands of years. But I don't think anyone is going to spend that R&D money on 12cm discs now that we have holographic data crystals (HDSS et. al.) for higher density long term offline archival, so I guess your point still stands
There's also Verbatim's M-DISC which uses an "inorganic write layer", basically burning holes in the disc. It has a projected lifetime of "several hundred years".
Perfect for a Mission Impossible reboot. "This tape, err.. disc, will self destruct in 10 seconds, err.. 48 hours"
You just stole my joke, you iron curtain nasty spy.
If my "Back to the Future" flexplay DVDs weren't void, I would use them to travel in time and place the comment before you.
Not quite perfect, needs the smoke, sparks and flames🤣
@@tonynicholson4227 Alongside the 80s, the 2015s and the DeLorian.
Nigel Clark The 80s version of MI used tiny self-destroying discs.
0:07 this video was posted on april 2019, disney plus came out on november 2019, he actually predicted it
Really the most impressive part of the video is the fact that you had a sealed copy of one of these things.
This just demonstrates how desperate consumers were to have a cheap rental- that COULDN'T have large late fee's. Flexplay had an idea, DIVX had an idea, Redbox had an idea, and Netflix had an idea.
Two won, two lost.
the consumers , yhea of course.......lol
@@lacroix1976 ? ..uh yeah..people didn't want late fees...
@@hoppinglark it was just an new idea to make money , simple as this , no crisis about late fee . we were a lot that were capable to return movie at time . can you imagine in my youth a movie rental was only 24h then later 48h and finaly 72h before video rental almost died ....and then this format was great idea for the road travelers that cant bring back a rental in 48h ....or when taking a plane for a travel , usualy travelers take at least 1 week so....and i can go on and on ....but desperates consumers as a reason , damn you had to much fee to pay you just had to go over the street to the other video store and start that $?*& all over again and again and again and not paying fee , and when a video store was closing you could go rent ps1 game a week before they closed and never bring back your rent ( keep the game yup ) and no agency were comming after you for the $$$ . in the end it s just that i dont agree with your statement ^^
@@lacroix1976 I guess your perception is different than mine. I knew families who would ,from time to time, misplace a movie from Blockbuster and have a huge late fee.
@@hoppinglark Good one! xD
Those cheeki breekies are loquillos. :v
We live in an era of easy recording. Watching a movie once in your home can quickly turn into permanent ownership with simple equipment.
We've been in that era for ages. VHS recorders were a thing, then DVD recorders.
@@Obi-WanKannabis
Note my use of the word "simple equipment"
By this I mean no more than something as simple as an HDMI capture with a single plug in, if even that. Software may suffice in some situations.
I would not consider VHS or DVD recorders as simple, given their size and cost during their prominence.
@@starlight4649 Their operation (from memory, I was young at the tail end of VHS prominence) was simple enough, my old nan has (yes still has them) 1000s of recorded VHS tapes from TV and rented VHS.
Some madlad here in the comments section said he bought several of them to see if he could copy the disc contents to a computer before they oxidized. It was.
@@liamjames-hendriks4895 exactly. @HighKing obviously has no practical knowledge of how easily it could be accomplished in the heyday of VHS. In fact, the limited choices of inputs and sources actually helped in that regard.