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It was reusable. The idea was basically the current iTunes model (rent for two days or buy forever) except with abstracting the license from the data since internet speeds weren’t fast enough to stream video.
So you’d “buy” or “rent” the license to watch the disc. Once your rental was up, you could give the disc to a friend who could buy or rent it. The idea was to basically use sneakernet to handle the heavy lifting and the internet just for license/DRM purposes.
Considering people today are willing to pay $10 to “own” a movie that’s on some server they will never see, it really wasn’t a terrible idea. Especially since the licenses were stored on the hardware, so your movies would continue to play even if the server shut down. It’s just separating content from rights management is a really abstract concept and they didn’t do a good job explaining it.
See also: people getting upset about day1 DLC being included on the game disc, but have no issue buying a digital download.
And people forget that Netflix's original model was also sneakernet. Before streaming was viable they would physically mail you a DVD, which when you were done with you had to drop off someplace or physically mail back. The difference with Netflix was that if you didn't give the disk back they'd whack you for a (rather inflated, as I recall) purchase price for the movie. DIVX would just disable your ability to play it until you coughed up, obviating the need for a return trip for the disk.
If you had a subscription, you could have a Netflix disc indefinitely. You just couldn't rent any new movies/shows until you returned it.
If you cancelled your subscription and kept the disc, then yeah they hit you with a "higher than cost" fee.
And it was a pretty great deal when you watched a load of movies, like my family did. We were very early adopters. Queue over a hundred titles deep and it never shrank because we added as fast as they came.
Ohh yeah. A huge movie buff buddy of mine had the 8 disc plan and rigged up a multiburner pc. His mail was also dropped off in the morning.
Dude would get up, grab his 8 movies, get them burning, go to work and drop them off in the post box same day before pickup. He'd have new movies every couple of days. He built a hilariously large movie library in just a few months.
That good "early to no broadband" pirating.
Also unlike modern day streaming, they didn’t have to worry about obtaining the rights to the movies. They could just buy the DVD from any retailer.
So there were no platform exclusives to worry about.