• While we realize it’s not directly Askew related, a subject that’s been permeating DVD websites over the past few years has been complaints about the inferiority of its competing format, DIVX. Yesterday, at the company’s website, www.divx.com, the product was officially announced as discontinued. We, along with the rest of the internet, it seems, rejoiced.

For the uninitiated, DIVX discs were a “pay per play” version of DVDs. They looked like a DVD, but that’s pretty much where the similarity ended. Many studios saw DIVX as a way to line their pockets, since customers would continually need to pay each time they wanted to watch the film (or even if they wanted to show a friend a specific scene, for example, yep, gotta pay the full price again), eliminating the middle man (the video rental store) and in effect bringing rental fees right to them. This was fine, to a degree, until certain studios (Fox and Disney being 2 big troublemakers) decided to release titles on DIVX ONLY and practically ignore DVD.

The trend WAS slowly shifting towards open DVD format for the past few months, with more big movies coming directly to DVD, where smart online shoppers at sites like reel.com and dvdexpress.com could get a new movie for about $14.99 with unlimited viewing. Not to mention, DVD offers superior picture quality due to widescreen 16:9 enhancement (not on ALL discs, but certainly becoming a trend), Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, commentary tracks, documentaries, trailers, and LOTS more. DIVX always offered the movie, normally in the fullscreen “pan & scan” format, and that was it.

Now that the product is defunct, in 2 years, DIVX players will no longer play the prodcut. Consumers who bought DIVX movies, even paid for unlimited locking (normally 15-20 bucks), may as well use their DIVX discs as frisbees. We knew this would happen, which is why we embraced DVD from the start.

Anyway, we think the moral of the story is this: Don’t assume the public is stupid. Even with major chain outlets like Circuit City singing the praises of DIVX over DVD, consumers were wise enough to see what a bum deal it was, and showed that by purchasing more DVD players and DVDs than DIVX. Who wants the complexity of having to hook their machine up to a phone line to call in whenever they want to watch a movie that’s on their shelf? Putting in a DVD and pushing PLAY is SO much easier, both on the brain AND the credit card.

In closing, with the death of DIVX upon us, studios will now need to embrace the DVD format more than ever in order to keep consumers happy and current. We predict many big announcements and good things to come in the next few months (including the releases of Clerks & Mallrats!).

Chasing Amy was released on the DIVX format, and MAY still be found if they’re holding any clearances on the suckers. We suggest picking one up for collector’s sake. We got ours a few months ago. Still in the shrink wrap.

Long live DVD!