OK, I'm not afraid to look stupid. (Don't tell anyone else, though...) What's a DIVX?

Oh, Doug. So innocent. So uncorrupted. Are you sure you want to hear the whole sordid story?

Well, at least you can hear the story and know that it has a happy ending: DIVX died a nice, clean death. But it's still important to remember the bad, evil things in history so that we're not doomed to repeat them. Despite the horrors of the Holocaust, it is our duty to future generations not to forget it. So it is with DIVX.

DIVX was the brainchild of Circuit City, teamed up with another company (whose name I forget, but was essentially a team of lawyers and other assorted moneygrubbers).

It came out when DVD was still in its infancy. It utilized the same technology as DVD, but had a difference: The playback devices were coded to deliver the movies on a pay-per-view basis. You'd hook up a DIVX player to the telephone line in the same way that you hook up a satellite decoder box.

The idea was to replace the current system that rental stores use. You never had to bring the disc back. Since the discs can be manufactured for next to nothing, they wanted to find a way to give away the discs, but charge for the "eyeball time".

You would feed the parent company your credit card, and every time your kid wanted to watch "Free Willy" again, cha-ching, another $2.50 gets deducted. (Or whatever the charge was going to be.)

And all that money was going to flow through the hands of the CC people. Sure, the movie companies got their share, but not after CC was done chewing off their chunk of it. And, of course, they SAID that it was going to help the rental chains by preventing losses from unreturned movies. But the truth was that they wanted to take the business away from the current rental chains and keep it all to themselves.

It gets worse. DIVX movies were all pressed as "Pan-And-Scan" discs, not wide screen. And DIVX players cost more than DVD players. Although Circuit City tried to hide the DIVX player prices by bumping up the regular DVD player prices to match.

The funny thing is, even if DIVX had taken off, the whole DeCSS debacle proved that its pay-per-view key protection wouldn't have lasted long against the hackers. Or, like the region-removal hacks on current DVD players, a simple hardware hack could probably have allowed unlimited plays anway. So they still would have lost revenue to pirates.

Fortunately, nearly everyone recognized DIVX for the scam it was, and sales of DIVX players were dismal. CC eventually dropped the whole thing at a huge loss.

And we all lived happily ever after.

___________
Tony Fabris