Despite the increasing rise of streaming services, optical discs, especially 4K Blu-ray, are still booming in the European and American markets.
A previous data shows that in the second quarter of this year, in the disc sales data including all physical media media such as DVD, standard Blu-ray, 4K Blu-ray, etc., 4K Blu-ray disc wildly sold more than 200 million, accounting for 11.6%.
Recently, SG posted an article reminiscing about the disc technology called Flexplay, which was born in the early 21st century when rental discs were still hot.
At that time, some DVD stores found that there were always cases of customers not returning discs or even losing or forgetting them. So, some manufacturers saw the business opportunity here and created self-destructing discs called Flexplay.
Simply put, this is a special DVD that can only be played for 48 hours. Once the disc starts to come into contact with oxygen, it will lead to a chemical reaction of the adhesive resin, and the disc will then start to slowly turn pink and discolored, and when it turns completely black, the result is that it can no longer be read, and you can throw it away.
The idea looks less than perfect, but I did not expect the launch of more than 2,000 licensed companies, including Disney, to use it, and by 2004, most abandoned it, because it caused a lot of disc waste.
In 2008, Flexplay made a comeback and convinced Staples store shelves, but a few months later, because no one bought and more bad reviews, removed from the shelves, from then on out of history.
