Re:A Cartrivision Player TV
by Arrath on Wednesday August 25, 2021 @02:55PM
(#28305461)
Single play tape cassettes. Jeez, the sheer waste of that.
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Have you heard of the monstrosity that is time-limited dvds? Not single play but almost as egregious.
And don't forget the abomination that was DIVX.
> Released June 8, 1998
> Discontinued June 16, 1999
Goodness that is astonishing.
I have! Hated that idea, too.
Re:A Cartrivision Player TV
by kraquepype on Wednesday August 25, 2021 @03:40PM
(#28305961)
I think the idea was to have it be a watch-once rental, so it could only be rewound by the store you rented it from.
I sure hope so, but I didn't quite get that impression from the thread.
There's an older thread linked inside the thread that indicates that the rental stores would rewind the tapes. Unclear if they would then rent them out again.
> the stores had special machines that could rewind the red tapes, but those weren't sold to customers. It's amusing in light of the later "be kind, rewind" campaign Blockbuster shoved in our faces for so long.
It makes no sense. Rentals are already time limited so making them unable to be rewound is just plain consumer hostile. It’s not hard to see why the format died so quickly.
Even if it had caught on there would no doubt be a grey market for those red tape rewinders.
Yep. But there wasn't a good model for home movies yet! Elsewhere I saw that the rewind machine had a counter and the store would be billed for each movie viewing. So they had the streaming payment structure in the tape era!