Consumable Media™ is the technology for Limited Play Optical Discs. With a license to our technology, you can manufacture and provide a disc that becomes unreadable after a pre-determined number of play/reads in any conventional DVD player, computer or game console. Below is a business and technical FAQ on our proprietary technology :
What is the construction of Limited Play Optical Discs?
Limited Play DVD discs can be single or double-sided, single or dual layer. In the case of Consumable Media™ DVD, a single-sided disc is composed of a recorded (pitted) side and a dummy side, while double-sided disc applications consists of two recorded (pitted) sides. The recorded side of a Limited Play DVD disc is a sandwich of a number of layers. Single layer discs have a polycarbonate plastic substrate containing a single layer of pits in a narrow spiral extending from the inside to the outside diameter of the disc. Added to this substrate is an organic dye layer followed by a metal reflective layer such as silver or silver alloy. The dummy side of a single-sided disc consists of a flat polycarbonate plastic substrate. An adhesive then bonds a recording and dummy side (for a single-sided disc) together into the final disc. The single-sided disc can also be topped on the dummy side with additional layers that provide surfaces suitable for labeling by inkjet, thermal transfer or re-transfer printers.
How are Limited Play DVD discs made?
Most Limited Play DVD discs are created in the DVD 5 format. The first step in manufacturing the Limited Play DVD disc is to fabricate the pitted polycarbonate plastic substrates using an injection molding process. The dye is then applied using spin coating and the metal layer by means of DC sputtering. The metalized and blank substrates are bonded together using a hot melt, UV cationic or free radical process. Consumable Media technology can also be used within the manufacturing of single-sided dual layer (DVD 9) and double-sided discs.
What is DVD5?
DVD 5 is a single-sided, single layer DVD that can hold up to 4.7 GB (120 minutes) of high quality audio and video data. All DVD 5 discs are made from two substrates that are bonded together, and the second substrate on a DVD5 is blank and does not contain any pits.
What are pits?
Pits are the recessed area on a DVD where data is stored. DVDs store data in lands and pits as 1’s and 0’s in binary computing. The bits are read by the disc drive that uses a laser beam to distinguish between the lands and pits based on the amount of scattering that occurs when the beam of light hits the pitted surface of the disc.
What makes this technology unique?
The Limited Play DVD disc has a coating composed of a dye capable of being irreversibly bleached by light absorption. In this DVD, the information encoding features are machine-readable prior to bleaching of the dye, which is activated by absorption of the laser light in the DVD player. The dye, once bleached, inhibits further reading of the information encoding features. Based on the application of the dye, the number of read/plays of the disc can be controlled and pre-determined.
Conventional discs have reached wide spread acceptance as a low-cost, reliable storage medium for sound, video and data. Although some discs have been provided with features to frustrate unlimited use, these discs have typically only temporarily rendered the disc unreadable. Further, known discs that are rendered permanently unusable have generally been rendered unreadable in response to time, such as by oxidation after removal of a barrier layer. Such discs do not provide optimum qualities of rendering a disc permanently unreadable in response to the number of uses.
With the Limited Play DVD disc, however, upon sufficient exposure to the reading laser beam, the dye in the disc coating undergoes a change in the index of refraction, resulting in unrecoverable data.
What uses are there for Limited Play Optical Discs?
Limited Play Optical Discs can be used for a myriad of commercial applications, including limited play DVD movies, providing limited use or sampling of content including music & audio, video, or even digital data. We have proposed uses for this technology that include:
- Disposable DVD’s
- Sampling of music content
- Limited play delivery of software programs
- Lower cost marketing of audio and video in a limited play format
- Delivery and security of digital information
- Limited copy protection and dissuasion
Can this technology be licensed?
Consumable Media LLC accepts proposals for licensing and contract manufacturing of discs that employ our proprietary limited play technology. To request more information on licensing programs, please visit the contact section of this website.
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