"Smut Free" DVD player. Thoughts?

[paul_pci]

Link to article about WalMart selling the first DVD player that can reputedly skip over violence, nudity, etc.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ilm_walmart_dc


I was hoping to solicit your thoughts on this product. While dismayed, I'm not entirely surprised by the appearance of such a product, but let's consider deeper questions. What does this mean for those of us to love audio and home theater? Do we shrug our shoulders and say, oh well, I'd never buy it? What impact could this have on the realm of HT equipment? Obviously, this is a moral issue, but when we critique or recommend equipment, can we avoid ( and should we avoid) being dragged into a moral debate when something like this DVD player comes to the market?

[karl k]

Link to article about WalMart selling the first DVD player that can reputedly skip over violence, nudity, etc.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ilm_walmart_dc


I was hoping to solicit your thoughts on this product. While dismayed, I'm not entirely surprised by the appearance of such a product, but let's consider deeper questions. What does this mean for those of us to love audio and home theater? Do we shrug our shoulders and say, oh well, I'd never buy it? What impact could this have on the realm of HT equipment? Obviously, this is a moral issue, but when we critique or recommend equipment, can we avoid ( and should we avoid) being dragged into a moral debate when something like this DVD player comes to the market?

I am curious to see how parents will react if so much of the content is removed from the movie that the kids won't be able to follow the plot and will begin asking questions durring the movie. It might be more of a hastle than anything. This is just another case where the parents are trying to duck active envolvement and someone trying to profit by it. How many people actually USE the V Chip? Or the ratings posted on the cover? How do you effectively remove the violence from T3 and still have any movie to watch??? Can you imagine removing the violence from Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, and Daffy??? No anvils, exploding rockets, and tiger claws slicing through Chesters body. Ahh, the classics!

As long as this isn't incorperated into every player AND made to work w/o choice, I don't have a problem. There's just no substitute for active involvement by the parents!

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

I personally find it a bit ironic that a company that has such a bad reputation as Walmart(kills mom and pops business, racial biases, use of cheap labor etc) would market a morality product. Have to agree with you Karl, another I don't want to supervise my childs television habits tool. I don't like decoders that do creative mixing(DPL II) and I don't like product that do video editing on the fly. Thumbs down big time!!!

[mtrycraft]

I personally find it a bit ironic that a company that has such a bad reputation as Walmart(kills mom and pops business, racial biases, use of cheap labor etc) would market a morality product. Have to agree with you Karl, another I don't want to supervise my childs television habits tool. I don't like decoders that do creative mixing(DPL II) and I don't like product that do video editing on the fly. Thumbs down big time!!!

I think they are republicans at hart following the leader.

[Scooter329]

I agree that this is a stupid idea. It's the same thing that walmart has been doing for years in deciding which music to sell in its stores based on content. I just feel sorry for the people in rural areas who have nowhere else to shop. By the way I'm a republican and I don't like censorship. Us republicans certainly don't have a monopoly on this sort of thing. Tipper Gore, who came close to being the first lady, did more to promote censorship in the medias of both music and films than any Bush has ever done. I'm also pretty sure the V-chip came out during the Clinton presidency. Not trying to start a political argument here, mytrycrafts, I'm just not a big fan of blanket statements. Have a nice day.

[mtrycraft]

I agree that this is a stupid idea. It's the same thing that walmart has been doing for years in deciding which music to sell in its stores based on content. I just feel sorry for the people in rural areas who have nowhere else to shop. By the way I'm a republican and I don't like censorship. Us republicans certainly don't have a monopoly on this sort of thing. Tipper Gore, who came close to being the first lady, did more to promote censorship in the medias of both music and films than any Bush has ever done. I'm also pretty sure the V-chip came out during the Clinton presidency. Not trying to start a political argument here, mytrycrafts, I'm just not a big fan of blanket statements. Have a nice day.

What did Tipper try to do that you consider censorship, I don't remember?
V chip is an option for parents to use, not censorship but a tool for parents. You want your kids to watch everything?
It would be censorship if it was on all the time for everybody. This is a discussion, isn't it?

[Rikki]

I am personally 110% against censorship of any kind, so I wouldn't but it. However, if parents want to buy a smart DVD player or a V-chip for their TV, then why shouldn't they ? It's just a tool parents can use if they think their kids are getting too much of a bad thing.

P.S. I would like to see Scarface or Cabin Fever edited by that DVD player. Now that would be funny.

[Woochifer]

WalMart's basically playing into their market. Even though they're now all over the country, the company was built on rural markets and families in the Bible belt. The magazines that they stock, the CDs they sell, and the movie titles that they carry, are all carefully screened to cater to that crowd. Weighing the costs and benefits of catering to an audience less tolerant of edgy entertainment versus consumers who are less tolerant of censorship, it seems that they've bet that they would lose more sales by stocking "offensive" material than whatever they would gain by carrying it. Smut-free DVD players are basically an extension of those video rental houses that rent "clean" movies, where they have edited out the sex, violence, and f-words. Even though I don't personally know anyone who supports those services, I have read that they are increasingly popular in more culturally conservative areas.

http://www.cleanfilms.com

(offtopic: is it just me or does the girl on that web site bring up the word association "home schooled" to you?)

WalMart's always been about dominating the lowest common denominator markets and meeting profit targets with sheer volume, not about breadth of inventory or serving niche markets. It's the same reasons why they've emphatically resisted stocking widescreen DVDs, and why behind the scenes they put pressure on studios to release cheaper movie-only discs rather than multidisc special editions. It's surprising to me that with the smut-free DVD player they would essentially stock a early adoptor product, but given that the feature will not raise the price of the DVD player by much, it's a fair tradeoff for them.

Personally, I think it's a dumb idea because it relies on constantly updating the filters to fit whatever movies might get played on it (the studios are certainly not going to encode their movies to be compatible with this). With over 20,000 DVD titles on the market, I doubt that anything more than a small fraction of that inventory will ever have applicable filters available. There's no substitute for being attentive parents.