Flexplay

About

Flexplay was a short lived video format created in the early 2000’s, the idea was to give people a way to rent movies without having to return them.

Flexplay discs were bought as a vacuum sealed DVD Disc, once opened a chemical embedded into the disc would activate and render the disc unusable after a short amount of time.

An interesting measure taken was the red color of the disc, which prevented the buyer from continuing to play the disc in a blu-ray player after the time limit. The red color of the disc prevents the blu-ray laser from reading through the black coating of an opened Flexplay disc.

However, Flexplay did not become popular, with a concern that the disposed discs would add to landfills being a main issue. The Flexplay company did attempt to set up ways to recycle the discs, but this required bringing the used disc back to the store or to mail the disc to a supported recycling center, which of course negated the selling point of it’s “play and dispose” usage.

Unfortunately the discs did have an expiration date. This means that many, if not all, unsold and unopened Flexplay discs are no longer playable, effectively making this a truly and completely dead format.

Interestingly, as discovered by Reddit user Altruistic-Ad5584 it seems that the red and black coatings have their own expiration date, which causes the disc to turn white and brown as it oxidizes overtime.