In the late 90s, a format war erupted between DVD and DIVX, two early pioneers in the digital home video market. DVD followed in the footsteps of VHS and Laserdisc as a dedicated home video format, albeit with superior picture and sound quality. DIVX, meanwhile, was a bit more complicated. The movies came on a disc that looked similar to a DVD, but they could only be played on a specialized DIVX machine. Customers could buy DIVX movies for $4, but the disc would only be playable for 48 hours. After that, they’d have to pay a small additional fee via a subscription service to watch it again, or an even bigger fee to access unlimited views.
Who Won?
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone with a Netflix account that things didn’t work out too well for the folks at DIVX. For starters, consumers never truly embraced the pay-for-play format that the company was trying to engineer. Videophiles shunned the idea of not being able to easily collect movies on DIVX, and the idea of a subscription-based video service rubbed most consumers the wrong way
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