OK so now it’s VideoNow then (now updated)

Now every time I mess up something and have to redo it I'll think that it takes 3 double A batteries.

That was a fun video. We bought the original B&W version for our kids back when they came out. They were around 5 and 8 at the time, so probably right in the sweet spot for this kind of thing, not caring much about the terrible quality. I remember them watching in the car on trips. I also vaguely recall them not working very well after a while.

Loved how you put this video together, Mat — really enjoyed it. (I'd never heard of VideoNow...until now.)

The videonow uses an odd "video" format that is basically written as a redbook CD which has been covered elsewhere but good call updating the video. Rip the CD, ahem "pvd" in EAC or something, then run PVDtools or similar tools on the cd-rip and gloat in the dissapointment.

Excellent video. Illustrates the money grabbing record/media industry at their worst. I’m off to man the barricades now. 😸

Got a good in real life chuckle out of me at the concept of using the awesome power of a time machine to just go back to buy a new Video Now Color

Good update 👍

Great video. They also did a portable kids dvr after this i believe. Seems videnow is the hitclips of the video world

Thanks for the update, I guess I was misremembering when I said they were viewable on a PC. I do remember using some free but quite rubbish authoring software to make my own black and white PVDs, I never did manage to find software to make color ones but I'm sure it existed somewhere. My kids very quickly lost interest in the device regardless so it was a waste of money.

I remember these. And I think they were killed off in the market by cheap chinese DVD players that started to encroach at the price-point of a Video Now. And what parent would want to spend money on a proprietary format when they could just buy a DVD player for their kid for a similar price. The same DVDs that work in your livingroom player.

Makes you wonder if a modern day version would be feasible ( no doubt a custom android based device with lots of parental controls and drm based)

I had to use Mat's time machine to go back to August 2020 to see the video on Mini DVDs. Funny that I haven't seen any mentions of this in the comments here yet. I wonder how many niches there are to the video media market? The extraordinary variety of formats, however, means that Mat must continue to descend deeper and deeper into the video mines to find and extract more obscure formats for our enjoyment.

The new thumbnail is amusing - it looks like the characters are flabbergasted by VideoNow.

No apology needed (ever, really) and the demo of other formats in the device and the "PVD" discs in the computer was a good addition. You may have been worn out but it wasn't apparent from your presentation and the addition was a good call on your part. ALSO ... what a *weird* product! Too long in the development stage maybe? With iPhones, et al, this will never be repeated ... and that's probably OK.

Gave up watching after the second ad break that rudely interrupts at random intervals, is YouTube doing this for all videos now? It is very frustrating to pay to watch via Patreon only to get adverts throughout, it's like paying twice, once with cash and again with my time. Perhaps videos uploaded to an alternative platform that can be ad free for Patreon members is the way to go if creators have no control over ads.

I bought a black and white model when it popped up in a local K-Mart ages ago and I distinctly remember it was almost a year before they started heavily advertising them on television. Ever since I've wondered if my market was chosen as a test market or not, but I never did fill out any surveys or anything, and I have a hard time believing they could have sold 1 million units through word of mouth, or I could just have the timeline wrong :S The lack of a backlit screen was absolutely a problem for me, and I'm also visually impaired, so I needed a magnifying glass to see it. The most humorous memory I can think of is when I got a drop of water on the disc once and the entire video was flipped horizontally.

I hit my mid teens around when this came out so I have no nostalgia for this era of stuff whatsoever. The early to mid 2000's was a fantastic time for gaming but for pretty much everything else it was a wash (IMO). Its weird because when Mat shows stuff from his childhood I feel a sense of nostalgia and even 80s toys I do (and of course 90s toys because thats when I grew up). But 2000's toys, my brain can't see them as anything but horrible. Everything was clamshell; everything was endorsed by Disney stars and it just reminds me of how much I changed around that time.

check out the screen on the Tapwave Zodiac mobile entertainment console , released in 2003

I bought the blue colour player in a charity shop for a fiver about five years ago. I'm assuming the staff just thought it was a CD player. It came with one disc, something with Eddy in the title, can't recall, but I'd never heard of it. I bought two other titles later on, the Star Wars one you have there, and an animated Mr Bean disc. And the machine died a death on New Year's Day last year, sadly due to my own incompetence, sticking an adapter in that clearly wasn't meant for it. When it started smoking, I decided to get rid of it rather than blow the flat up. Yes, the quality WAS as bad as demonstrated here. Also, it had to be watched flat. I recall it not liking it at an angle, plus the screen had to be seen face-on. Also, I'm struggling to remember if my speaker worked? Maybe it was intentionally mute to save kids irritating parents? Then, why add one though?

The speaker on the color player not working could be down to failed capacitors. I wonder if that could also be affecting the screen brightness, or if it was just terrible from the beginning. Either way, great video. It never fails to amaze me that people actually bought some of these things

When this came out I was 11, a big fan of anything Cartoon Network I really liked the look of it - thankfully my mum and dad bought me a portable DVD player for Christmas and I absolutely loved it.

Despite the poor quality of the screen etc, I really enjoyed watching this. I never owned one of these but it sort of sums up my own personal experience whenever revisiting old tech I used to own. Recently I got my old Nokia N900 out of the drawer which at the time (2010) was a phone I really liked with it's Linux based os and slide out qwerty keyboard....but now with my knackered eyesight and fatter fingers the keyboard layout and low Res screen are unworkable, still I do remember liking it a lot so I guess things move on and so do my own expectations and ability to see and stab at a physical keyboard with any degree of accuracy.

I was 15 when the first versìon of this came out. I don't recall this whatsoever. Did it make it in to the Argos catalogue?

6:20 I now have DankPods' "A Brand New Nugget" song in my head

Glad I was able to get a Sony PSP in 2005 instead of these, I was 14 in 2004 so probably the top end of the target market for the VideoNow. I only had one UMD for the PSP, Spiderman 2 and it came with it for free.

It's very well possible that the bad screen / backlight quality in the color player is because it was stored for many years. I've owned a Logitech Harmony universal remote control with a similar low-resolution LCD screen for probably 10 years or so. The local Target store discontinued them about 6 years ago or so and I bought a spare one in case something went wrong with the one we had in the living room. I left it in the garage in the blister pack. Recently I got annoyed that some buttons were starting to work less and less, and decided to break out the spare from the garage. It works much better but the LCD is much darker and has much less contrast than the first one we bought much earlier and used every day. Apparently being in a blister pack in a garage for a few years where the temperature easily makes it up to 40 C / 104 F in the summer, doesn't do an LCD screen much good. Go figure.

I can imagine today's RIAA seeing that commercial and sputtering into explosive rage when the kids on the school bus swap movie discs. "THAT'S EXACTLY LIKE ***STEALING!!!***" he screams at the voice-over guy. "I WANT THEIR NAMES!!!"

Thanks for this Mat. I have a problem with 60fps video playback. Not sure why, but it keeps stuttering. Not just your video, so I had to watch in 480p. Maybe it's my USB connected external monitor.

Nowadays, kids will be watching videos on their Smartphone. My cousins 13 year old Granddaughter was making them the same week that she got her £100 Samsung. As for the selling of media I was trying to work out how much a Top Twenty single used to cost. A forum post with quite a few real examples showed that for decades it was about the same as a U.K. gallon of petrol. That didn't stop Paul McCartney selling two million copies of Mull of Kintyre !

Oh dear, I fear I'd rather watch early mechanical scan line television than this thing 😃. Much love for breaking out the time machine. This is definitely an item outside my generational sphere. I don't remember seeing this for sale - I was in my mid-twenties when this was out. I can see how much work you took in putting this video together - so many elements - the cheesy TV advertisements, the multiple versions, multiple audio clips. I'm going to re-watch on TV after work because I'm sure I missed some things. In the US, candy is still prominent at the cashier counters. A detriment to my chubby self. Is it unacceptable that I haven't watched a single episode of SpongeBob SquarePants?

I believe it's a motion JPEG video format, very light to decode, beside a PCM 8bit mono audio channel. The disc maybe is a red book compliant media, and you can rip all the tracks like you do with an Audio CD. You could get the audio and video stream in a raw format, the problem is decoding it.

Never heard of it, but I guess I was outgrown such a thing at the time, having a laptop to play DVDs I wouldn't even have noticed this device... But as always, that's cool to see on this channel ;-)

Have you tried playing the disks on a computer Mat ? It would be interesting to see if they played on something like an old G4 Mac.

Awesome been wanting you to cover this one for ages! I remember seeing commercials for this thing as a kid on Disney Channel and wondering what the appeal was of a portable device that only played in Black and White? Especially considering by that point that movies and TV shows were being released on GBA carts, sure they looked like crap but at least they were in color. It seemed as if Tiger Electronic's hadn't learned their lesson from the Game.com, their ill-fated attempt to enter the handheld gaming market, it bombed because it's games were mostly terrible black and white ports(Sonic, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem) that ran like absolute crap(I saw commercials for that thing as a kid as well and I also thought it looked stupid). Then the color version's appeal only lasted for a short while until the PSP came out as it could not only play movies in much higher quality(I used to own the UMDs for Bad Boys and Starship Troopers back in the day)but it had a killer library of games to boot, rendering Video Now obsolete overnight. P.S. do you have any plans to cover the S-VHS, W-VHS and Super-BETA formats in the future?

Those adverts remind me of the adverts that still run on modern-day kids TV channels, very annoying and over-hyped, and so many of them. So much for not advertising to kids. Watch Nickelodeon on Virgin Media (on demand).

i used to love my VideoNow, although i think i only ever had the one 3-pack (Dexters Lab/Ed Edd n Eddy and i think Codename Kids Next Door) and it really didnt last long - think it only took a few months before it would permanently skip There were a few odd releases for it too - a fair few documentaries and at least one 12 certificate film that most of the target demographic wouldnt be able to legally buy xP

What do you get if you put the disc's in a laptop drive? Surprised that the resolution and 16 Grey's of the BW one is actually pretty watchable other than the light issue...

Loved the time machine! I'm surprised that supermarkets in the UK don't have sweats at the checkout line. It's pretty commonplace here in the states. Come to think of it, as recently as my last trip to Europe, I was surprised to see liquor at the checkout lines.

Hard to believe this got greenlit - the level of cynicism involved must have been tremendous. Thanks for sharing it!

My kids had the same color version you showed, it was indeed backwards compatible with the black and white edition so you could play both formats - their older cousin had the B/W version so they inherited a bunch of his PVDs. Free tools existed to author your own videos and then you could burn them to a regular disc so I ended up making a few PVDs for them. The case could be modified to take a regular sized CD-R, I never bothered with that I just bought some mini CD-Rs and dealt with the loss of storage. I think I ended up messing with it more than my kids did doing the modifications, they quickly got annoyed with the fact if you looked at it funny the thing would skip and for active preschoolers that was just hopeless. We ended up buying them regular portable DVD players and the VideoNow most likely ended up in a landfill.

Awesome