DIVX (Digital Video Express)

~ the goodbye ~

DIVX never left the united states, and it barely lasted long enough to leave california. it belongs to a very american kind of retail idea, the sort of thing a big electronics chain dreams up in a boardroom and rolls out with confidence before anyone checks whether people want it. i learned about it years after it was already dead, reading old tech coverage, the way you learn about a strange local product that never had any reason to reach turkey.

here is what it was. in 1998 Circuit City, then a giant of US electronics retail, launched a DVD variant called DIVX. you bought the disc cheaper than a normal DVD, but it only played for 48 hours after you first pressed play. the player had to dial an account server over a phone line to authorize the disc, and if you wanted to keep watching past two days you paid a continuation fee. the discs would not run in a standard DVD player at all.

the pitch was that you never had to return anything to a rental store. the reality was a movie you had paid for that stopped working while you still had it in your hand, from a machine that reported back to a company every time you used it. it did not sell.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the first trial ran in San Francisco and Richmond starting 8 June 1998, then went national later that year. Circuit City backed it heavily and lined up studio support, betting that convenience would win over ownership. the DVD itself was brand new in 1998, so the company was trying to fork a format before most people had even bought into the original one.

~ the decline ~

reviewers and buyers both balked at the same thing. a disc that expires and phones a server to bill you was a worse deal than either renting or owning, and the players cost more because they carried the phone-home hardware. the wider DVD world, meanwhile, was open and simple, and it was winning fast. there was no room for a locked, metered cousin.

~ what got buried with it ~

Circuit City pulled the plug on 16 June 1999, about a year after the first trial. it booked a $114 million after-tax loss, and outside estimates put the total damage around $337 million. existing discs kept working until mid-2001, when the account servers were switched off and every DIVX disc in the country turned into a coaster on the same day. the phone-home, pay-to-keep-watching idea did not die with it, though. it just moved online and became the shape of nearly every streaming service that followed.

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