This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

Airport "rentals"

The ideal market for this is airports. Buy one before departure, watch it on your laptop, throw it away at the other end.

Lots of US airports already offer rental of conventional DVDs (and even DVD players) -- I'm amazed they get any business at all given the inconvenience of having to return the disc on your return journey.

More useless junk to litter the planet

What a daft idea. As if there isn't enough rubbish generated by human activities and consumerism polluting the planet.

Surely the EU has a law which prohibits or restricts the manufacture of wasteful disposable things such as this? If not, there bloody well should be.

hmmmm

So its even more crap we get to throw out into landfills? woohooo

Its a "rubbish" idea!

The tin foil jacket on the left please..

Hmm

Hmm , actually under German Trash friendly plastic package laws , I would not be unsurprised that most if not all used expired units will be sent collect mail back to sender for proper disposal !

In other news...

... a company has introduced a new product: VidiFix! Just spray on the surface of your disposable DVDs as soon as you open the packaging and the video stays for days and days! Now in Fresh Lemon and Forest Pine scents!

j/k of course, though I would not be surprised if such a thing was created.

@ Mr. Grundy

It's probly more to do with oxygen exposure. So when you took it out of your vacuum chamber, the clock initialises...

SHe knows about self-destruction.. oh yes indeedy...

Son of DIVX?

Hmm, sounds suspiciously like a certain failed venture from the late-90s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

Literally a rubbish idea

With the current reliability of CD/DVD burning, I was beginning to worry about my future supplies of coasters. Now, I'm relieved. Well done, then!

It seems they've forgotten about the colossal failure that was the original DIVX format.

Sounds great

I can watch a DVD while drinking my self-cooling beer..

http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/20/miller-to-introduce-self-cooling-beer-cans-next-year/

Do you think they'll offer "An Inconvenient Truth" in this format?

Extending the time period...

My guess is it reacts with either oxygen or nitrogen (oxygen I'd guess) in the air to cause the degradation... so you should be able to improve the duration by putting it in the fridge (slow the reaction) or putting it in another container and flooding it with something inert (carbon dioxide or nitrogen)

Mines the white lab coat...

Well yes but....

In response to: "So does this mean that I can put my DVD player inside a vacuum chamber and as long as I opened the pack inside the chamber it will never go bad?"

Your DVD might not go bad. But you would not fare as well in a vacuum.

*pop*

And now the sci-fi fan inside me is wondering, would a DVD player that plays in a vacuum overheat?

carbon footprints??

So I guess that the carbon footprint of a jiffy bag (ohh plastic!) and posting the disk back (cos the post office use those lovely long chain hydrocarbons were all so addicted to) is acceptable?

Personally I would like to see the movie/music industry execs round up and shot, for crimes against hypocrisy, and to then get on with drm'less streaming.

But until that day comes people are going to keep trying to make disposable disks, and I'm sure if they need to they can make the disk bio-degrade in a reasonable time frame if the demand for these things is high enough.

And yes Mr ISP, I did say streaming. I pay for my bandwidth and I expect full access to it. Cap it all you want but tell me what the caps are, charge me a reasonable amount to extend it if I download more than normal and DON'T sodding well throttle/shape/tamper in any form what so ever the link.

(if any one cares there is an ISP that offers this last bit already, Zen, and very good they are :)

Miffed that piracy is still the best way to watch a sodding film. (Who wants to pay for a film to be told how you could go to jail. I have never seen that notice on films I download)

</errm off topic rant...>

AC

jolly roger... more of the the roger and perhaps we would have less rants :,(

um...

DIVX?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

I love this idea

This is great! They are finally pricing the movies at how much they are actually worth.

It also doesnt take 48 hours to copy them. :)

Pop the vacuum bag, straight in to the computer.

Bowl of water?

If I keep my disc underwater, when not in use, will it extend the life?

Holy crap.

What a massive waste.

OK, great so someone thought about recycling them...?

What they forget is, recycling takes up a shitload of energy too (it has a carbon footprint)

So, what's better than recycling your DVD's?

Downloading them? Could be... I'm not sure if servers take up more power than recycling plants...

Either way, I hope this crashes faster than George dubya in his DUI days...

Flexplay

I've seen Flexplay discs at a local Choice gas station/cigarette dealer. They usually run for about 4 dollars or so, and do exactly this. 48 hours and they're gone. I've never really gone for it, because if there's a movie I want to see, I'm usually going to just buy the disk anyway.

Mine's the one with the DVD reciept in the pocket.

Re: carbon footprints?? by AC

"So I guess that the carbon footprint of a jiffy bag (ohh plastic!) and posting the disk back (cos the post office use those lovely long chain hydrocarbons were all so addicted to) is acceptable?"

Thing big man! Why not drive the disc back to the rental store in a SUV?

I bant believe no one said this yet

What about going into an airport buying 1000 of them, for the "flight" 46 hours ahead of time? Then you have your own bomb, supplied of course, by a MPAssA. Wonder if that will change a few minds. I dont think they want to be responsible for downing a plan full of Americans.

/mines the one with the disposible DVDs strapped inside.

OK if cheap enough

I have no problem with the idea, but the price needs to be lower! € 3.99 is way too much: real DVDs sell at about that at the discount bin. € 2 for such disposable fun sounds just about right. It can be paid for with a single € 2 coin, so you could easily sell these in vending machines at airports, railways stations etc.

just wasteful

more rubbish to add to our epidemic of plastic bags and bottles.

sure stuff can be recycled, but at what cost? more pollution?

this idea only serves a few money greedy corporations and individuals.

besides, i have a dvd recorder as well as a dvd player. nuff said!

Identity theft

If only the UK government used them.

Then we wouldn't have to worry about who's stolen our identity when the CD with the 20 million names and addresses on, gets lost in the post!.

Maybe it's in Milan courtesy of BA.

Getting my coat, see ya.

Not big in Japan

A company tried this in Japan, under the name 48DVD, and sold such 48-hour DVDs in convenience stores in 2005. 3 titles were released at the price of 480yen (currently £2.35/$4.69), and it was all over.

Great, more garbage !

If all these boffins spent as much brainpower to come up with ways to actually SAVE precious materials and energy as they do on creating more disposable crap, te world could actually be a better place.

Paris, because equally she doesn't have a clue...although none of the folk in thes picures actually have.

What about FREE DVD's with advertising.

They could stick adverts in these DVD's and make it so you have to watch them (I guess you could look the other way while they are playing, or go and make a cuppa) and then give them away for free.

Not everyone's choice perhaps, but you could always pay the £3.20 to watch the non ad supported version.

As long as the ads where short + entertaining, I think this could really make it work. It would have to be proper good pucker films that you'd actually wanna watch though.

Even better, make you pay £1 for the first one and then you can get the next one for free if you bring back your old smoked DVD for re-cycling by the outlet.

SteveB

Look out...

here come the tree huggers.

Paris because you need to be as daft as her to actually think that consumer packaging waste is the real problem facing the planet.

What a waste

What about all the electricity wasted producing these dvd's

Surely it is more ecologically sound to make one dvd than can be rented by hundreds of people than hundreds of dvd's that can each be used by one person.

No...

Just...

No...

Seriously.

No.

Can anyone else spot the flaw?

Back when I was just 8 years old and Prince Charles was a single man, I worked out all by myself how to modify an audio cassette so that it could only ever be played once. (ROT13: V vafregrq n fznyy cvrpr oebxra bss sebz n ynetr ybhqfcrnxre zntarg va gur cngu orgjrra cvapu ebyyre naq gnxr-hc fcbby.) I had dreams of the record companies bowing down before me, as people rushed to buy more and more copies of the same songs on one-listen tapes.

But only for a few seconds, because I soon realised that there was a tiny imperfectionette in my plan. Well, alright then, more of a massive flaw. OK, then, if you insist, there was a hole you could get a bus through sideways.

One playing was still enough to make a copy; and the copy presumably would be made on a normal, reusable-as-many-times-as-you-want cassette. Thus rendering the original self-destruct mechanism about as relevant as public opinion under a Labour government.

Anyway, this is exposing a rather large bullet hole in the film studios' boot. If they can afford to sell DVDs with this expensive chemical coating for €3.99, then they obviously can afford to sell them *without* the coating (and so viewable forever) for *less* than that.

Throw Away World

Yes... hmmm good... more garbage, just what we need.

Reaction

Might be better if they figured a way that the reaction was triggered by exposure to light (ideally only laser light).

Also to those that talk about it taking less that 48 hours to rip a DVD, why would you pay £4 to rip a DVD when you can just download it of a P2P. The only reason I can think of is convenience it is a more convenient way to pirate and more profitable for the studios, the more I think about it the better it sounds - it could be a win-win situation.

More trash

It is quite sad that it's cheaper to use throw-away stuff rather than find a way to reuse it. Unfortunately, the only way to change that is to impose huge taxes on throw-away stuff. We don't really need that either...

Polycarbonate, schmolycarbonate

It's not the plastic, it's the fact that it's permanently stuck to a metallic coating. That makes it as recyclable as a TetraWak carton (recyclable cardboard + recyclable plastic = landfill).

You could replace the polycarbonate with polylactic acid from fairly traded organicly grown butterfly-attracting flowers and this would still be an irredeemably shit idea.

Alternatively...

Is there any chemical that will break down polycarbonates at room temperature that isn't also massively hazardous to the touch?

My guess is that the coating applied is one that hazes over as time passes, rather than one that actually breaks down the surface.

If that's the case, I wonder whether one of those gadgets for polishing minor scuffs out of CDs would be sufficient to remove the coating, restoring the disk to full-lifetime use...?

@ Sandpir8

"Even with the almighty dollar now relegated to the position of a pygmy vs. the Euro, us yanks (whilst jobless and subsisting on our public assistance cheques) can rent DVD for $1.00 / day. One dollar vs. six plus??? You do the maths!"

_We_ Yanks

1 - rarely say "whilst";

2 - may receive assistance _checks_, and;

3 - and studied _math_, not "maths".

Are you a ringer, or are you just trying to posh it up for the Reg?

Self destructing DVD.

Actually you don't even need to haze the polycarbonate, as the data carrying layer is the thin layer onto which you have the label printed, all that has to be done is add some thing that will destroy that layer, which is not polycaronate (afaik).

But the whole idea stinks, I get told to save power, don't drive so much, you have to watch your CO2 and meanwhile anyone in buisness who wants to protyect their copyrights are wasting energy in magnitudes I couldn't even dream to produce if I tried, in an effort to protect their precious copyrights.

DRM = more cpu cycles wated = more power (read CO2) used to use the data.

Selfdestructive DVD's = more energy wasted for items with limited usage, because you need to produce more.

@ Michael Nielsen

" ..... [T]he whole idea stinks, I get told to save power, don't drive so much, you have to watch your CO2 and meanwhile anyone in business who wants to protect their copyrights are wasting energy in magnitudes I couldn't even dream to produce if I tried, in an effort to protect their precious copyrights."

EXACTLY. Have a cigar!

If they can make a profit by selling "self-destructing" discs for €4, then they can obviously afford to sell otherwise identical "everlasting" discs -- made by a process with fewer steps -- for the same amount or less. Methinks this is worthy of investigation.

Personally, I'd like to see it made law that any "disposable" item must not be sold more cheaply than a reusable item intended to perform the same function many times over (so zinc-carbon batteries should cost no less than NiMH ones, cardboard plates should cost as much as china ones, a fountain pen would not cost more than a non-refillable ballpoint, and so forth) with the revenue raised from the "disposability tax" used as a subsidy on reusable goods.

@David Wiernicki

That's just silly letting Stuart decide.

I think it should be me.

That way I can ban the things I don't like, but not ban the things I do like, or involve those who will pay me lots of money.

Why do I keep sounding like BT, Phorm, NuLabour?

Joke Icon because...well...NuLabour, but not because I should be the one who decides. Remember, The current President of the United States of America once said, "Deciders do the deciding and I'm the Decider". or something very similar.

run it under the tap

which washes off the stuff which makes em rot... problem solved.

This is an immensely stuipid and wasteful idea.

@ Stiles

"Personally, I'd like to see it made law that any "disposable" item must not be sold more cheaply than a reusable item intended to perform the same function many times over (so zinc-carbon batteries should cost no less than NiMH ones, cardboard plates should cost as much as china ones, a fountain pen would not cost more than a non-refillable ballpoint, and so forth) with the revenue raised from the "disposability tax" used as a subsidy on reusable goods."

A brilliant idea actually, excepting the batteries, for two reasons:

1. Wiki says zinc-carbon batteries are inferior to newer alkaline chemistry batteries, which could explain why I never see zinc-carbon batteries for sale.

2. Even ignoring the above, NiMH are not really equivalent to either chemistry, due to their higher rate of self discharge, different performance under load, and different nominal voltages.

So while they make a good replacement for disposable cells in some applications, they are completely unsuitable in others, such as flashlights, emergency radios, remotes, etc. because of the self discharge and can mess with devices which demand exacting voltages.

@Pete "oranges" B.

There is already such a product in the market.

It's called AnyDVD.

Pop it into the DVD-ROM drive of any AnyDVD-installed PC, make a copy (onto hopefully* longer lasting DVD+R) and Viola!

*Hopefully, because I've seen crap quality DVD+/-Rs that self destruct on their own due to lousy manufacturing process.

Good business case

"DVD-D Germany Ltd has high hopes for its home country market. Disposable DVDs have already been successfully introduced in France, Italy and Scandinavia, it says. Others believe the concept is dead in the water, as on-demand online rentals will kill movie DVDs, of whatever hue, soon enough."

France ? Never seen any. Scandinavia ? I don't see any of those folks buying wastes just to polute the planet and their country some more. Germany ? With so many of them voting green, yeah of course, a new business is born </sarcasm>.

Those guys are under drugs to be so optimistic, let's watch them fail !

The only valid use would be (as others have pointed out) to perform large data transfers operated by hopeless morons, but they would need to make it a writeable solution, which is not easy in the aforementioned environment.

Mine is the one with the pockets full of self-burning DVDs.

Netflix?

Sounds pretty wasteful to me. Netflix anyone?

Why not?

When you're talking about the U.S., 90% of U.S. Households have DVD players and in the rental process, you make a trip to the rental store, then return again to drop the movie off. Just the oil and gas alone has a much higher carbon footprint than a limited life DVD. The same goes for Netflix. These things go in the mail stream and go back in the mail stream.

This is a convenience-based product. I think the bigger issue is what happens to all the plastic packaging and the disc itself after use. Consumable Media is another company in the U.S. that has developed limited life DVD technology. Theirs works without all the extra packaging. Rather than being triggered by oxygen, it is affected by the laser in the DVD player. Pretty cool stuff.

Maybe I'm a contrarian here, but I don't think this technology is bad at all. What I do think is that it's a means to gap consumer demand and habits today until we reach the type of digital download adoption that combats these problems tomorrow. Let's remember here, 80 million households rent movies. Until they move to movies-on-demand or digital download, there's no reason why this technology isn't a solution if it prevents them from driving their SUV's around for special trips to the video store.

Too little, too late

Might as well just create VHS tapes that you can't copy. Or a telegraph with a SSL certificate.

I have a Blockbuster account, but the funny thing is I've had the last 3 movies for a lot longer than I usually do. My "On Demand" does well, and if not, I have the internet to keep me entertained.

Oh well. back to my Apple IIc.

Very eco-friendly!

Why oh why?

Yes you can copy it, but you can also copy 'normal' rentals

Why is the copying going to be the death blow?

You could copy any normal rental dvd anyway? (and with the 1,2,3 month free intro intro rental by post you 'could' copy 20/40/60 dvds for nothing, and then cancel)

This might work, If for example you could pick from 1000's of movies in a vending machine, for just a quid (have it burnt in few minutes while paying for petrol). i only watch the things once or rarely twice anyway.

On the Eco front, not great, but you could say the same for any dvd you buy.

Any real diffrence on the eco front than if the price to buy a normal dvd was just a pound or two? and the packaging would be more then too.