A "position" paper from sophomore English. And, thankfully, totally outdated by this point. DivX--Circuit City's DivX, I mean--is by now long dead.

Jonathon Rubin

Mrs. Stumpff

English 10 H

23 February 1999

Why Divx Must Die

Since its release in 1995, the DVD medium has seen enormous and unprecedented growth. While competing formats have continued to plague DVD since before even its release, the DVD Consortium and later DVD Forum have managed at least one major success in the form of the most widely-known version of DVD, DVD-Video. However, DVD-Video is haunted by its single digital competitor, Divx. To avoid yet another standards war in the grand and illustrious history headlined by VHS vs. Betamax, some solution must be found. The most fitting, most likely solution, which would benefit users, retailers, and studios, is for the open DVD-Video format to own the market.

DVD, or Digital Video Disc, began as a "consortium of 10 companies: Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, and Toshiba" (Taylor). In the most basic terms, it connects the inevitable evolution of CD-ROM technology with the latest advances in digital compression. DVD corrects the problems encountered with the Laserdisc format and those ignored by the enormous VHS market. It gives the most vivid picture yet seen by a consumer audience and the clearest audio, and also allows for users to choose whether they want widescreen or standard video and which of eight possible language choices, 32 possible subtitle languages, and nine camera angles. In addition, the discs can not wear out like tapes, and "bonus" materials can be added to the discs, such as cut scenes, outtakes, interviews, and biographies.

Divx, or Digital Video Express, discs started from the same roots. In fact, Divx discs are DVD-Video discs, just with special encryption. The players are DVD players, and can play normal DVDs, with extra equipment, raising the price to $100 more than a comparable DVD player, to allow them to call Digital Video Express–founded by Circuit City and a Hollywood law firm, Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca & Fischer–whenever a disc is used. Why would the player need to call the company to allow a disc to be watched? This is because Divx discs only cost about $4.50 retail. However, they are only playable for two days, after which they cost $3.25 for additional two-day viewing periods. Alternatively, for somewhere between $15 and $20, Divx discs can be upgraded to "Divx Silver" status, making them playable for an unlimited time period. Yet, this too has a catch. Divx discs are keyed to specific players. If the user goes over to a friends’ house and wants to watch his "Divx Silver" disc he still has to pay the $3.25 rental charge ("Answers…Divx Questions"). Furthermore, Divx versions of films lack many of the extra items DVDs throw in, such as letterbox format, extra languages, extra subtitles, and cut scenes. According to Divx’s spokesman, "[they] are for home users who want to rent Titanic or Men in Black, not videophiles who want 28 versions of Army of Darkness"(Stamper). It would appear Digital Video Express believes that the average consumer can not appreciate anything above and beyond "pan-and-scan" summer blockbusters. One should also note that neither Titanic nor Men In Black is available on Divx.

Divx may have begun as altruistic attempt to remove some of the problems with renting movies, or as an attempt to divulge fools from their money, but its features, while lacking, cannot be ignored. One user claims that "’It keeps you from having to go back to the store and return it and do all that necessary garbage, which I hate to do’" (Fost). However, its lack of many of DVD’s potential features and the format’s possibility to become horrendously expensive for users puts it further down the scale based on pure merit. By its very nature, Divx would also destroy the rental market–if it survives. The arrogance and disdain for consumers presented by the leaders of Divx, shown yet again in comments like "Our audience would wonder why there were black bars on their screen" is only compounded by a lack of discs (Stamper). Divx’s website only displays three hundred seventy-five Divx discs, including some that are not yet shipping. By comparison, DVDWave, an online retailer and renter of DVD-Video, claims to have "over 2,500 [titles]!" Selection, of course, does not mean quality, but even Divx’s earlier ace up its sleeve–exclusive contracts with several studios, including Dreamworks SKG–disappeared in the summer of 1998.

The real danger of Divx is that, by confusing potential consumers, it delays wide acceptance of DVD in general. After all, "If you visit Circuit City asking about DVD, a salesperson will probably lead you toward the Divx aisle" (Persall). In a new market, competing standards are a detriment for consumers, not a boon. Production of electronics costs more in small volumes, leading to inflated prices for both Divx and normal DVD-Video players with the same holding true for the media. It costs more for a studio to release a film on both, and this cost is transferred to the consumer. By choosing one format or the other, studios lose some of the market, leading to inflated prices for producing either until the volume increases.

So if a studio wants to catch on to the latest wave of digital video, how can it choose a format? Numbers would work well enough. 10,000 DVD players sell a month, with 80,000 sold over the 1998 holiday season ("Best Buy"). One vendor alone, Best Buy, sold "nearly 3 million DVD movies" in 1998 ("Best Buy"). One must give Divx credit for a far later start, as the platform launched nationally only over the summer of 1998. They sold 87,000 players and 535,000 discs to date. Impressive, it would appear. But those statistics miss the point that every Divx player includes five discs, chosen at the point of purchase. This means 435,000 were given away. As such, only 100,000 were sold, as compared to approximately 750,000 DVDs in the same period ("Less than 17,000"). Much more interesting is what a bit more simple math reveals. If, as Divx’s Chairman says, the average Divx user has eleven discs, and only 100,000 additional discs were sold, only 17,000 users could have bought six extra discs ("Less"). This means 70,000 Divx users only play normal DVD-Video movies in their Divx players. In other words, last year alone gave normal DVD-Video a market of 160,000 players not counting personal computers capable of playing DVD-Video or the 87,000 Divx players that can play DVD-Video. This, in comparison to the 17,000 loyal Divx users, leaves motion picture studios with a very easy case.

It can be very difficult to dislike an underdog, especially in platform wars. As a Macintosh user, this is something I deal with daily. Divx, however, is not Apple. And for all I compared this situation as a brewing VHS vs. Betamax, that is not entirely true. Betamax users were loyal because they believed it was a better platform, and it was hard to ignore that fact. Divx is not a better version of DVD-Video. In fact, it definitely is not. The only card Divx has to play is convenience, and as much as convenience is a wondrous thing in today’s world, as McDonald’s would readily attest, Divx lacks a truly lower cost or higher quality. McDonald’s survives in spite of lower quality because of lower cost. Federal Express survives in spit of higher costs because of higher quality. In comparing Divx to those two monuments to convenience, one finds a format with equal cost and lower quality. This, together with lesser popularity, would appear to destine Divx to failure.

Yet, that death shall be a slow one, as long as Circuit City continues to push the format. This leads to severe consumer confusion and higher costs. If something is unavoidable, and waiting for it patiently has negligible benefits and significant damages, the only sensible alternative is to openly accept the inevitable. And so I ask Circuit City to accept the inevitable. Kill Divx now.

Works Cited

"Answers to Common Divx Questions." Divx.com (n.d.): n. pag. Online. Internet. 13 Feb 1999.

Available http://www.divx.com/faq_general.htm

"Best Buy Announces Record Sales for DVD; Hardware and Software Sales Exceed All

"DVD Wave." DVD WAVE (n.d.): n. pag. Online. Internet. 13 Feb. 1999. Available

http://www.d vdwave.com

"Divx," Divx (n.d.): n. pag. Online. Internet. 13 Feb. 1999. Available http://www.divx.com

Fost, Dan. "Latest Video War Erupts." San Francisco Chronicle (13 Aug. 1998): n. pag.

Online. Internet. 13 Feb. 1999. Available

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/08/13/BU36940.DTL

"Less Than 17,000 Divx Accounts Registered." DVD News (7 Jan. 1999): n. pag. Online.

Internet. 13 Feb. 1999. Available http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/dvd/news05.html

Persall, Steve. "To DVD or Not to DVD?" St. Petersburg Times 19 Feb. 1999: W20.

Stamper, Chris. "Is Video Rental a Goner?" ABCNEWS.com (n.d.): n. pag. Online. Internet. 13

Feb. 1999. Available http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/dvd_divx.html

Taylor, Jim. "DVD FAQ." DVD Demystified (4 Feb. 1999): n. pag. Online. Internet. 13 Feb

1999. Available http://www.videodiscovery.com/vdyweb/dvd/dvdfaq.html#1