DIVX is a uniquely American product -- designed to take advantage of both laziness and wastefulness. Like its DVD cousin, DIVX is a disc the size of a CD that can hold 2 hours or more of video. You can get them from Circuit City in Richmond and San francisco right now... and across the country later this summer. Once you bring the 4 dollar disc home from the store, you plop it in the DIVX player and once you hit play, you have 48 hours to watch it as many times as you'd like. Its pretty much the same up to this point as a regular video cassette. But once you are done with the disc you can just throw it away... there's no need to return it to the store so you'll never pay late fees with DIVX. Of course, you can also keep the disc and buy an additional 2 days of viewing... or buy the movie outright. In addition DIVX players can also player regular DVD movies.

So if this is such an appealing sounding technology, why do I sound so down on it already? What's the downside to never paying a late fee?

Well, for starters, your DIVX player has to be near a phone line so the unit can upload you payment information. No phone line, no movie. The DIVX folks are amassing all sorts of data on you every month, although they promise to keep it secret. And if DIVX dies, you won't be able to play many of your discs because there'll be no one to call. In fact, the player disables itself if you unplug it from the phone line for a few days.

You can only get DIVX movies from a few places, like Circuit City... the home appliance company that is backing this technology. Video stores won't rent DIVX since most of them are focusing on regular DVD movies.

DIVX also gives you the very distinct feeling of being nickled and dimed to death. make no mistake, the DIVX folks don't want you to throw the discs in the trash can. They want you to impulse buy 2-day, 4-dollar viewing periods over and over and over. Oh, and don't try and take the movie you bought to a friend's house -- chances are it won't work and you'll have to pay again.

Finally, you can forget about playing DIVX movies on your laptop while flying across country, or on your desktop computer. DVD can do that, DIVX can't. That's because there are no DIVX players for computers, and no one is planning to build any.

DVD is a great new way to watch movies and do a whole lot of other things too. Its not just films DVD can store and play back, but anything that can be digitized. In fact, its such a versitile format that high end PC's and Macs are starting to come with DVD-ROM drives instead of CD-ROM... its a format that'll soon come to the masses. And CD-ROM's will play just fine in a DVD ROM drive... they *won't* work in a DIVX player.

Despite its seemingly attractive benefits, DIVX threatens to stifle the growth of the DVD and DVD ROM markets by confusing the consumer. DIVX also promotes the very worst in our "throw it all in the landfill" mentality. All of this just so I don't have to go back to the video store? I'd rather take my chances with the late fees.