From the “lame technology” department.  A German company has developed disposable DVD discs that can be viewed for a period of 48 hours after the package has been opened before becoming unreadable by DVD players.  These DVDs are reported to sell for only €3.99 ($6.44 /£3.20).

Only $6.44? You may as well pay a little more and buy the movie; unless this is a movie you aren’t sure about and in that case there is another (quite illegal) solution.  If you watch the movie and decide that its worth keeping; act within the correct time frame and with the proper software, it would be possible to make a copy as it appears to employ no DRM protection of any kind.  That’s real smart on the part of the company.  It’s still illegal to make a copy but you’d think it would have taken steps to prevent that.

Then there’s the disposable part.  You don’t return the disc to a store or mail it back to the rental company, just toss it in the trash or recycle it (oh who am I kidding?).  That’s very wasteful.

The Register reports, DVD-D Germany Ltd’s ‘Einmal’ discs have a self-destruct layer that begin dissolving as soon as it is exposed to an oxygen atmosphere.  As soon as it has, DVD players or PC DVD drives will display a “no disc” read error.

Disposable DVDs were attempted in the US, here’s a hint, head over to Best Buy, Circuit City or even Amazon.com and just see if you can find any?  No?  Yeah, worked out real well, didn’t it?

In five or six years, DVDs will be sitting in the bargain bins just like VHS tapes are today because Blu-Ray will have taken over and five or ten years later, we’ll be sitting around our holo-projection OLED SHDTV (Super HDTV) sets hooked up to a holographic disc player wondering what primitive things DVDs were in the first place.  DVDs… what?

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Entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 3:18 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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