Fear and Loathing in Frisco

Home Theater, October 1998

Divx was an early disc-based attempt by the Hollywood studios and electronics mega-retailer Circuit City to create a pay-per-view home video player, back in the days when the internet couldn’t yet handle live streaming. It had the potential to derail the launch of the DVD format just as it was set to replace VHS tape as the premiere home video format. Fortunately, the Divx version of DVD never gained traction commercially and died a fairly rapid death, something I like to think we helped along with our two major features at Home Theater.

After our Divx-bashing cover story in December 1997 that explained the origin of the technology, we set about doing a review of the first player. But when a sample was not forthcoming from the one manufacturer building the decks, we solved the problem by going to the test market in San Francisco and buying one ourselves. This also afforded an opportunity to see how well the salespeople at Circuit City and its competitor The Good Guys had been trained on the intricacies of Divx. I had a romp reporting the story and ended up writing it in the voice and Gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, hence the headline. Our art director commissioned a great illustration of me dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Thompson’s trademark beanie cap to accompany the story. Final postscript: I found out after we published that the mystery blonde who became a key character in the article was actually Laura Evenson, then a tech reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle who, by sheer coincidence, was out reporting on Divx on the same day in the same two stores.