doodledee

There's a new DVD technology that's gonna be rolled out later this summer called EZ-D. EZ-D discs will be cheaper than conventional DVDs but will only be able to be played for 48 hours after they are opened. I guess the atmosphere chemically reacts with the disc causing it to slowly change color. After a couple of days, it's changed enough that it's unreadable.

From a business perspective, the technology is very similar to the infamous Divx format that sucked so hard a few years back. The difference is that Divx required a crazy special player that had to have a phone line plugged into it so it could call The Man and let Him know you were watching one of His movies. Another problem was that there were only like 8 movies available on Divx. Go figure, it didn't last.

This time around, Buena Vista Home Entertainment has stepped up to be the pilot studio for the first round of EZ-Ds to be released. This likely means that those of us who are lucky enough to be in one of the initial test markets will be able to purchase a temporarily viewable copy of The Hot Chick. Man, that'll be a sweet 48 hours.

On one hand I'm all for the EZ-D. It seems like every time we rent a movie, one of us ends up racing to the video store at 9:55 the next night, trying to avoid the late fee. That sucks. It'd be way better if we could just throw it away.

But on the other hand, everyone throwing their movies away creates a lot of waste. (See: AOL) And what's worse, if this thing takes off, the technology could easily start being misapplied. After all, why not make *all* DVDs into EZ-Ds? Or better yet, how about all digital media everywhere? Enjoy your new CD that you get to listen to for 2 days. Oh, and you better hurry up and install that software, too.

And, lest we forget, Buena Vista is owned by Disney. That means that your kids will probably be getting Disney DVDs in their Happy Meals. Ah boo.

So for now I guess I'm cynically optimistic.