Flexplay - the 48 hour, no return DVD

Topic Post 2

Reading the section about "the Experience Economy" in the text (Kotler & Armstrong p277) triggered memories of an article I read a while back (perhaps it was this one) about something called Flexplay. Has anyone else heard of Flexplay? Well the company spells it out themselves here, but it can be summarized as a new kind of DVD that self destructs Mission Impossible style after about 48 hours. Well, it does not explode, but once you take it out of the package, it reacts with oxygen to become useless.

How could anyone in their right mind (let alone dozens of inventors, marketers, manufacturers, and financiers that started this business) think that this is a good idea? Good question. If any of them had read "The Experience Economy" or any marketing text for that matter, they would surely have understood that NOBODY wants to buy DVDs. Nobody even wants to rent them. People want to watch movies. The "Core Benefit" (p279) of a DVD is that people can watch movies with high quality sound and video in the comfort of their own home. The creators of Flexplay seemed to latch on to the notion that people don't like to return rented movies. If consumers don't like returning rentals to the store, they will not like having to mail coasters off to some recycling center. They formed their product around Less-for-Less positioning: offering a lesser product for a lower price (p264). The lower price is a questionable benefit at best since consumers can easily buy DVDs from places like Columbia House and half.com for less than $10. While they may have initially fooled Disney into thinking it was a great idea (shame on you Disney), this partnership did not last.

Aside from the obvious landfill issues, the problem that these "EZ-D"s have been having is that consumers buy them unwittingly. I am sure that many people bought these thinking that they were getting a really good deal, but later found out that they were duped. I never saw one of these in a store, so either I shop in the wrong places or distribution never expanded past the original test markets. There appears to be one disk still available on Amazon.com. The movie reviews for this film seem to be focused more on the disk itself rather than the film. I flipped through a few and (no surprise) did not find many glowing reviews of this dubious new format. It appears that by now Flexplay is being killed off by Netflix and Blockbuster mail services as well as the TiVo type on-demand services that many Cable companies are now offering. I say good riddance.