At the same time, nearly everything on PCs was watched with DivX, which made things annoyingly confusing
Divx was a video codec and much better than the others at that time. It was super confusing when Circuit City announced their DIVX program.
Yeah DivX was awesome. Really led the way in allowing videos to be shared online. I wouldn’t have seen half the anime I did if it wasn’t for it.
I think the first DivX I watched was Princess Mononoke. Not a bad start for sure!
All this talk of DivX, but no mention of (the open source alternative) XviD? Maybe people confuse them. I think I had way more XviD videos at the time.
I remember it very well. You also needed a special player to play them, which only Circuit City sold. It was all cheaper than DVDs and DVD players, but obviously only if you watched it once or twice. And it was more expensive than renting it at Blockbuster.
Just a stupid idea.
Ironically the “viewable for 48 hours” is now the model for renting streamed movies using a special device. They were ahead of their time.
It’s not that ironic.
Renting used to exist, and it required you to have a dvd or vhs player. Renting on streaming doesn’t require a ‘special device.’ In fact it is the least special device needed by comparison, as you can watch on so many different devices.
48 hours was pretty common on new release rentals too, if not even less time.
Imagine if instead you needed to buy another tablet that only functioned as a video rental device. And nothing else could watch the rentals. That would be closer to reality.
I remember DirecTV in the late 90s used this model. When you wanted to watch a pay-per-view, you had access to a channel that was streaming broadcasting it for 24 or 48 hours.
And I had a dude down the road always ready with a card to slap in my box so I could watch every channel for free.
I watched Bigger, Longer, and Uncut first, then Cruel Intentions. I don’t remember the movie, but I was way into the actresses. Good god Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon really made my 14 year old brain short out bad. I can’t remember a single thing, seriously, but I watched it like 30 times.
I’d say less stupid and more shortsighted. If the cost of DVDs were to have stayed high for, say, 10+ years, then I could see getting a user base for DIVX and having at least moderate success.
But a giant tech retailer of all things should be aware that new tech tends not to stay prohibitively expensive for too long.
Circuit City’s downfall was due to a lot more than just a DVD player that didn’t sell well.
They also had famously bad customer service and made a lot of other very strange decisions about what products they would and would not carry.
When BestBuy started to take their market share, they had stores that were notcsurrounded in vultures and they actually sold dishwashers and whatnot.
Circuit City was run by a bunch of people who thought they could punch a penny here and there to optimize revenue, and they optimized themselves into become stores had terrible products and people.
They were on commission. I had a friend selling plasma televisions when they first came out and sold warranties as including fuel refills. Ya know because you need to refill the plasma just call us when the television displays the reminder.
Holy crap man. There’s no way someone didn’t complain. He never mentioned getting caught. Made a killing while he was there.
They also had famously bad customer service and made a lot of other very strange decisions about what products they would and would not carry.
But but the jingle said ‘Service was state of the art’
ITT: people confusing DIVX with DivX
Don’t act like they’re stupid for not knowing the difference because of the caps lol.
Sorry, I’ve only ever seen the “ITT” comments used to make fun of people.
I’m actually surprised no one got sued for trademark infringement. Two video-related products having such similar names.
I distinctly remember my last time in a Circuit City. I don’t recall the date, but I’m going to say it was circa 2006. I had purchased a Nintendo Wii at one of CC’s competitors but the competitor did not have any suitable Game Cube controllers. So I went over to Circuit City to see what they had since they were essentially in the same shopping complex. In a surprising turn of events, they actually did have Game Cube controllers in stock, they had the style/brand I was hoping for, and the price was actually reasonable.
They had dozens of employees out in the various sections of the store, at least one per department. There were a plethora of customers. However, they had literally 1 cash register open. The line was backed up into the aisles. I am pretty sure I waited 45 minutes just to check out with this one single item, and that’s only because the customer service manager came over after about 40 minutes and offered to check out anybody with only 1 or 2 items.
Might be a complete surprise to the former corporate overlords, but for some odd reason I decided never to go back after that.
Circuit City had a rough transition out of the 90s. For a while they were pretty highly-regarded because they had salesmen who actually knew their shit. They had specialization of skills within the store, so the sales experience was excellent.
But with the rise of internet sales, mega-store’s like Frys, and Best Buy going to the Walmart model, they couldn’t keep up that level of service while being price competitive. Some stores really tried to keep the service excellent, but they did it by cutting back on things like maintenance and checkout staff, so you had some stores that were filthy and took forever to check out, but had full staffing in the sales departments.
But in the end their salespeople weren’t enough to keep them alive. Especially when you could learn what you needed from them, then go to the next strip mall down the road and buy the products at Best Buy for 20% less.
My last time there I was trying to buy a GPS for someone. I walked up to the counter and saw the GPS I wanted. I couldn’t get either of the people behind that counter to sell it too me. They were pushing something else and simply wouldn’t sell it to me. I went to best buy and purchased it. A few years later they were done.
