MovieCD

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

~ the obituary ~

Sirius Publishing announced MovieCD on 15 November 1996 and had it on American shelves by the following February. The pitch was a feature film on ordinary compact discs, playing in a window on a machine you already owned, with no decoder card and no new hardware of any description. A film was $14.98, and a Playboy title was $19.98.

The picture was 320 by 236 at sixteen frames a second in 16-bit color, which in 1997 already looked worse than a VHS tape through a cheap deck. Compression was Motion Pixels, a codec Sirius had bought the year before, and the entire design existed to fit inside what a 2x CD-ROM drive could feed it. A disc held about forty-five minutes, so a feature ran to two or three of them.

Over 131 titles came out. New Line Home Video, Anchor Bay, Trimark and Rhino licensed catalog into it, alongside a great deal of Playboy and a great deal of Troma. Around 300,000 discs moved in the first eight months. That is a real number, and it was never repeated.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

To understand why anyone bought this you have to remember what the alternative cost. Video CD existed and was large in Asia, but playing MPEG video on a mid-nineties PC meant a decoder card, and a decoder card was a purchase decision with an installation attached. Motion Pixels decoded in software on a 486 with eight megabytes of RAM. That was the whole argument, and for about a year it was a good one.

Then DVD launched in the United States in March 1997, six weeks after MovieCD reached retail. One disc, a real picture, on a player that sat under the television where films had always been watched. Wikipedia blames the commercial failure on Sirius being slowed by rights negotiations and then overcome by the avalanche of new releases, which is true and also generous. The format was beaten on picture quality by a machine your parents could operate.

~ the funny part ~

A format whose selling point was convenience asked you to get up in the middle of the movie. Laserdisc had trained a certain kind of enthusiast to accept exactly that interruption, but a laserdisc was twelve inches across and felt like an object worth the trouble. MovieCD asked for the same break in exchange for a picture smaller than the window it played in.

~ the paperwork ~

Commercially it was over by 1999. No MovieCD carries a film newer than 1997, and by November 1999 the company's own store was running 99 cent clearance specials. The HTML on that page then sat untouched for five years.

The company took much longer to stop than the product did. Sirius filed Arizona annual reports through October 2004, and the storefront locked itself behind a server-level forbidden page at the end of that same month. The Motion Pixels trademark had already been canceled in January 2004 over a missed Section 8 filing, and on 9 April 2005 the USPTO canceled MOVIECD the same way, for a declaration of continued use that nobody sent. Arizona issued the certificate of revocation on 7 March 2006. The registration outlasted the last shop that stocked it by six years, and it is the only part of MovieCD that anybody kept up.

~ where I was ~

I was twelve when this was announced and a long way from the only country that sold it. The PC I would get online with two years later had a 33.6k modem attached and lived in Turkey, where films came off rented cassettes and buying a movie to watch in a window on a computer was not an idea anybody around me had. I found out MovieCD had existed decades afterward, from the people who catalog this sort of thing for the record. There are still fans maintaining a title database for a format whose own maker let the name lapse.

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