DVD had been billed as the next big convergence medium. People thought, hey, we've got one thing we can buy, and the price is coming down, and it's going to be here a long time, and there won't be a format war. We spent days just deleting foul posts from the forum. The vitriol was amazing. It was almost like early adopters should expect to get burned and that's the risk.
Circuit City acknowledges that they missed the early-adopter boat.
But cornering the market is only part of the problem. Resentment against Divx isn't confined to geeks watching dismayed as the value of their new home entertainment systems instantly depreciates. Divx, in other words, appeared to be a greedy attempt to wrest power away from the individual and back to the corporation. The consumer had lost control. You can only play the movie in the way they let you play the movie.