VideoNow - the worst quality pre-recorded video format ever?

A look at VideoNow - the mid-2000s video format for kids.

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EXTRA INFO
If you want to learn more about the PVD format here's an old thread on Videohelp

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[DankPods]

I have one of these sitting new in its box and I had no idea the screen was going to be THAT bad. Wow, what a nugget!

[dragonfye]

I remember ‘Video Now’ very clearly. I wanted one, and almost got one for my birthday WAY BACK WHEN, but when my father saw the quality of the video itself instore, HE INSTANTLY said ‘HELL NO! im NOT spending my hard earned money on THAT, no way! Pick something else out.’ He would instead buy me a sizable stack of new gba games. Later that year, at christmas, he bought my siblings and i a PROPER portable DVD player to use on long car rides. Can’t say anyone regrets these choices.

[ddawsonwilsondawg]

The lack of shock protection IS A FEATURE! Imagine all the fun kids had making thier fav. characters skip! It's an INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE!!!

[pinkrainmoon]

I remember my older brother having one of these when I was little and I was *beyond* jealous! You can watch cartoons without having to watch through commercials! AND he could watch TV *in the car*? Mindblowing. We were truly living in the future.

[BokBarber]

When I was in middle school, this was one of the first devices I remember causing mass skepticism about advertising. At first everyone wanted one. A few kids got them, brought them to school, and it became clear that it was a glorified audio player with only 1-2 cartoons per disc. Within months there was a complete 180 where having one on the schoolyard got you made fun of and they disappeared from sight. The color one came out, but by then the name had been dragged through the mud and nobody wanted to be associated with them. Then portable DVD players came down in price and the GBA titles were released, and just like that it was a relic.

I remember seeing adds for these as a kid and thinking "that's a worse DVD player", not because of the quality, but because of the time limit. When buying discs was rare, cramming 4+ hours of video on a disc was a big plus.

[theboldfuture]

I was in the target demographic for the VideoNow when it was released - and used it plenty on car rides with friends, etc - but I never ended up owning one. My family was instead persuaded into buying a portable DVD player at just around the same time - 2004-ish. The VideoNow color at $75 + limited discs was a REALLY hard sell at a time when house-brand portable DVD players complete with lithium rechargeable batteries were under the $100 mark and usually featured bigger, brighter, clearer, higher-resolution screens.

I agree with Mat's assessment at the end - don't let me ruin your fond memories!! But the tech here just wasn't impressive for the cost.

[Asian_Kid]

There's something special about watching videos on low resolution screens. Like watching cutscenes on the DS felt magical.

[TRLTheRandomLab]

I had the color version as a kid. You're spot on about the video quality, it was awful. But the appeal was not the quality of the video, just the fact you could watch them portably at a price your parents were willing to pay.

They also had *NO* DRM, which is really shocking considering the price of the unit and the PVDs, especially when Viacom was the content owner on many of them. I ended up inadvertantly creating a VideoNow piracy ring at my elementary school. All I had to do was rip the PVDs in my cheap Windows XP eMachine, burn them to a CD-R, and then use scissors to cut the discs to size and sanded the sharp edges as much as I could. Eventually somehow I was able to get access to the teacher's paper cutter, for more neat disc cuts.

Any money that Viacom lost, ended up going to the Band-Aid corp, because we frequently had cuts on my fingers from the rough edges of the discs.

While it was a really crappy product, it did introduce me to hardware hacking.

[Psycho]

Never really hits home how amazing it is that smartphones can do all the things they can do so effortlessly until we see something like this.

[QuillC]

I remember seeing this thing as a kid and thinking "This. This is truly the future of mobile entertainment". Thankfully I never got the chance to hold one in my hands to see my dreams shattered.

[kolonarulez]

I just found my old VideoNow inside the case full of discs, mostly Fairly Oddparents. The zipper was stuck shut which was the perfect protection from time.

[eballer]

I had one of these as a kid and I actually loved it! Despite being comparatively crappy, as a young kid in the early 2000s there was a level of freedom or excitement involved with having a personal video player. Nothing else like it really existed at the time, at least for a broke kid like myself.

[MagnaRyuuDesigns]

It always amazes me that one of the selling points for things like this is that they say you can trade the media with your friends. When you know no parents allowed their children to just give trade the media that cost so much.

[theob]

For a second I was giving this product a break thinking it was some 90's toy. Then you pulled out the gameboy micro and that instantly aged it into just being a terrible product.

[wesleytwiggs]

I had a video now as a kid and I didn’t notice the screen being bad. In my memory it was amazing. Seeing this through a grown up lense is one thing, but as a kid this product was awesome.

[jhosk]

As someone who had the original model as a kid and loved it, I can tell you the one you got was not faulty. It would frequently skip -- I would make it skip just for fun -- the glare was constant, the compression was outrageous, and the screen and image quality was laughable. Yet, I still thought it was the coolest thing ever.

[imperialofficer]

Never owned one but feeling a distinct "I'm four and peering into the tiny screen in a grimy airplane economy class seat not to enjoy the show but to drown out the misery of either having just thrown up or going to do that just now" vibe

[needleonthevinyl]

This is a perfect Techmoan video. Context, researched, explained out, answered all the questions, great camera recording quality and angles. The time you put into production really shows!

[tyttuut]

As a late 2000s to early 2010s kid, I would have loved the idea of this. My very own video player! And then I would have been bored with it after a few plays and tossed it in a drawer for the next decade, only to find it now in 2022 and go "oh yeah, that was kinda neat!"