Overview
The technology was originally intended as an alternative means for the short-term rental of newly released movies. Since the disc is capable of being used in any standard DVD player, the manufacturers hoped it would succeed where other time-limited DVD technologies, such as DIVX, failed. Test marketing of EZ-D discs began on August 2003 but was canceled early when consumers rejected the concept (partly due to environmental issues). Due to fears of cannibalizing DVD sales, movies were made available on eZ-D between 2 months and several years after being released on DVD and were priced at US$6.99, both factors that significantly limited consumer demand.
SpectraDisc was another such technology, and on January 13, 2003 Flexplay Technologies acquired all of the SpectraDisc Corporation assets. SpectraDisc discs worked in a similar way as Flexplay discs, only not starting as red and turning blue instead of black. The addition of the red layer to Flexplay discs may be in order to protect the expired discs from being read in next-generation players using blue lasers, for which the oxidized blue-color layer is essentially transparent.
In 2004 Flexplay was sold to The Convex Group which also owned the Lidrock and HowStuffWorks brands. As of 2008, Flexplay discs were priced at around US$4.99, a price comparable to that of a two-day DVD rental.
Read more about this topic: Flexplay