Flexplay (EZ-D)

» see flexplay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There was a dye held in the bonding resin between the two halves of the disc and it reacted with oxygen. Sealed inside a vacuum pack it stayed clear for around a year. Once you opened the pack it went from clear to black over roughly forty-eight hours, and somewhere in that window the laser stopped being able to read through to the data layer. Nothing crumbled and nothing melted. The disc just got too dark to see through, on a schedule.

Flexplay Technologies was founded in 1999 by two academics, Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, and the chemistry was developed with General Electric. The first commercial run came in August 2003, branded EZ-D, in a test with Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment. The discs went into convenience stores and pizza chains rather than video shops, priced somewhere between five and seven dollars, which was what a two-night rental cost anyway.

The pitch was the absence of a second trip. You bought the film where you were already standing and then you did not have to remember anything about it afterward. No due date and no fee for the day you forgot. Rental had a friction problem that everybody in America could describe from memory, and Flexplay had removed it by making the object worthless instead of making the customer responsible.

That friction was a specifically American retail condition and it is why this product reads as foreign from where I was sitting. Turkey had video shops and then disc shops, but never a national chain with a late fee large enough that you would design a consumer product around escaping it. By 2003 I was spending time in internet cafes in Ankara where wanting a film meant finding a file somebody had already pulled down, and wanting it on a disc meant a burned one from a stall. A disc engineered to expire was answering a question that had been settled a completely different way everywhere I could see.

~ the record ~

~ the dye ~

The chemistry was the only genuine invention here and it worked exactly as advertised, which is rarer than it sounds for a format with a gimmick in it. The disc was a normal DVD in every other respect. It played in any player and needed no new hardware at all, which is what separated Flexplay from every other expiring-media scheme that asked you to buy a machine before you could buy a film.

It also produced a piece of garbage every time it worked. Environmental groups objected in 2003 and objected again in 2008, and Flexplay's answer was a prepaid recycling envelope you could mail the dead disc back in. Mark Murray of Californians Against Waste put the complaint plainly at the time: the objection was not the plastic so much as the message, that a product built to last for years was now being built to last for hours. The recycling envelope did not really address that, because the objection was to the design and not to the disposal.

~ two goes at it ~

Disney ran the EZ-D test for about a year and dropped it in February 2005. The retailers had not wanted it, partly because a product that expires on the shelf is inventory that dies whether or not it sells, and partly because consumers looked at a disc costing the same as a rental and could not see what they were getting.

Flexplay came back in July 2008 under its own name, without Disney, with licensing from Paramount and Warner Bros among others. This time the placement made more sense: Staples across roughly 1,500 stores, and then the airport newsstands and highway travel centers where somebody actually cannot return anything. It sold at $4.99. It lasted another two and a half years and was discontinued in April 2011.

~ what the late fee was worth ~

The timing of the first failure is the part worth keeping. Blockbuster's late fees were not an annoyance the company tolerated, they were a revenue line worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and the whole Netflix pitch had been built against them. On 1 January 2005 Blockbuster announced it was ending them. Disney dropped EZ-D about five weeks later.

Flexplay had spent six years and a General Electric research partnership solving a problem that the company causing the problem then removed for free. There was still a market for cheap disposable film after that, but it was much smaller than the one the business plan assumed, because most of the value had been sitting in a fee that no longer existed.

~ what replaced the problem ~

Redbox put a kiosk outside the supermarket and charged a dollar a night, which solved the same trip problem with a machine that took the disc back. Then streaming arrived and the object went away entirely.

The idea did not die with the format. Rent a film on any store today and you get a window of about forty-eight hours before it stops working, which is the identical product with the identical restriction. The only thing that changed is where the expiry lives. Flexplay had to put it in the chemistry because it had no way to reach into your house and switch the film off. Everyone selling you a rental now does have that, so the dye became a flag on a server and nobody thinks of it as a countdown at all.

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