I remember it very well. You also needed a special player to play them, which only Circuit City sold. It was all cheaper than DVDs and DVD players, but obviously only if you watched it once or twice. And it was more expensive than renting it at Blockbuster.
Just a stupid idea.
Ironically the “viewable for 48 hours” is now the model for renting streamed movies using a special device. They were ahead of their time.
Hopefully all these things follow the same path. Bankruptcy. Like their morals.
At the same time, nearly everything on PCs was watched with DivX, which made things annoyingly confusing
Divx was a video codec and much better than the others at that time. It was super confusing when Circuit City announced their DIVX program.
Yeah DivX was awesome. Really led the way in allowing videos to be shared online. I wouldn’t have seen half the anime I did if it wasn’t for it.
I think the first DivX I watched was Princess Mononoke. Not a bad start for sure!
Was .AVI the output of a DivX rip?
.avi is a container format. It can contain a divx video stream or almost any other encoding of video as well as audio streams and other media. It isn’t exclusive to divx.
All this talk of DivX, but no mention of (the open source alternative) XviD? Maybe people confuse them. I think I had way more XviD videos at the time.
I just now realized that XviD was DivX backwards.
Back in the day, I never knew the difference between the two, I just saw DivX getting gradually replaced by XviD.
ITT: people confusing DIVX with DivX
Don’t act like they’re stupid for not knowing the difference because of the caps lol.
I sure did
Where am I doing that?
DivX was purposefully named to mock DIVX.
Sorry, I’ve only ever seen the “ITT” comments used to make fun of people.
You might be projecting your own biases.
This reminds me of Flexplay, which was a DVD that had a coating which made the disk unreadable after 48 hours. Technology Connections did a wonderful video about it.
I used to put them in a plastic baggie, push all the air out, then stick it in the freezer. It seemed to halt the process long enough to give it to a friend and allow them watch it after the 48 hour period.
I distinctly remember my last time in a Circuit City. I don’t recall the date, but I’m going to say it was circa 2006. I had purchased a Nintendo Wii at one of CC’s competitors but the competitor did not have any suitable Game Cube controllers. So I went over to Circuit City to see what they had since they were essentially in the same shopping complex. In a surprising turn of events, they actually did have Game Cube controllers in stock, they had the style/brand I was hoping for, and the price was actually reasonable.
They had dozens of employees out in the various sections of the store, at least one per department. There were a plethora of customers. However, they had literally 1 cash register open. The line was backed up into the aisles. I am pretty sure I waited 45 minutes just to check out with this one single item, and that’s only because the customer service manager came over after about 40 minutes and offered to check out anybody with only 1 or 2 items.
Might be a complete surprise to the former corporate overlords, but for some odd reason I decided never to go back after that.
Circuit City had a rough transition out of the 90s. For a while they were pretty highly-regarded because they had salesmen who actually knew their shit. They had specialization of skills within the store, so the sales experience was excellent.
But with the rise of internet sales, mega-store’s like Frys, and Best Buy going to the Walmart model, they couldn’t keep up that level of service while being price competitive. Some stores really tried to keep the service excellent, but they did it by cutting back on things like maintenance and checkout staff, so you had some stores that were filthy and took forever to check out, but had full staffing in the sales departments.
But in the end their salespeople weren’t enough to keep them alive. Especially when you could learn what you needed from them, then go to the next strip mall down the road and buy the products at Best Buy for 20% less.
I miss Fry’s. I need to go to my local microcenter.
Technology connections did a video about something related: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ccneE_gkSAs
I was mistaken because I thought Circuit City’s downfall was a Bain Capital joint, but they were just run by a different set of idiots Circuit City
In August 2008, the chain’s head office demanded stores destroy all copies of an issue of Mad magazine which described “Sucker City” as a chain with a long list of locations, all in proximity to each other and each adjacent to a rival Best Buy store.[45]
Initially, only a single Zenith player was available starting at $499, along with 20 to 50 titles. Very few players sold during this time period, with The Good Guys chain alleging that fewer than 10 players were sold during this time period.
This seems to be the fundamental flaw in the plan. If the DVDs just faded over time, but were system agnostic, they likely could have worked as a distribution scheme. But who is going to go $500 out of pocket (in '98 no less, so closer to $1000 today) for a player that eats your discs after two days?
What’s hilarious is that divx was the most popular pirate format back in the day before they went commercial use and xvid replaced it.
I think that was deliberate, and some pirate cheekily named the file format after a hated junk DVD format
Yeah I remember it being called “DivX ;)” so DivX with a wink.
It’s (the formats) downfall was thinking these companies could charge twice the price of a normal DVD player to consumers, just so the consumers could rent a DVD and not have to return it. That, coupled with the younger crowd not having a working phone line in their house by 1998, as cell phones started taking over.
God, imagine the piles and piles of garbage dvd’s that would have been thrown away if this had taken over normal rentals.
To the curious: Redbox kiosks popped up around 4 years later in 2002.
twice the price of a normal DVD player to consumers
$500 was the standard rate for a player in '98. Maybe a little cheaper. But why bother buying a marginally smaller newer version of Laserdisc if the discs themselves evaporate?
