A couple years back, during a double date with my bro, Ben, at the fantastic Thai Ruby (in Provo, UT, USA - highly recommend it if yer in the area!), we wandered next door into the CleanFlicks store and rented our first edited film (can’t remember the title...). At that point, we were hooked, as we loved film, but didn’t want all the unnecessary language, violence, nudity, sex, etc in our home.
Unfortunately, a couple years later in July 2006, Cleanflicks (and all the various derivations) faced an untimely demise due to a lawsuit signed by some Hollywood heavy weights (but hey, who can say they were sued by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Norman Jewison - of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame??!)
However, the lawsuit didn’t afflict a relatively new upstart company showcased on the Today Show with Matt Lauer (in the USA) called Clearplay, which eventually was protected under the US Congress’ Family Movie Act.
Fast forward to Kim and I living in Washington, DC, and we saw Clearplay on sale in the local Target store. We snatched it up, and fell instantly in love.
Now, Clearplay’s distinguishing feature is that the original DVD is unaltered...its edited on the fly almost instantaneously - as the DVD spins so rapidly, its easy to fast forward thru the naughty bits without so much as a hiccup...really hard to notice most of the time - and the audio can cut out for the foul language just like pressing your mute button on the telly.
Kim and I had to part ways with our beloved Clearplay right before we hopped the plane to Sydney, because at the time, it was an American only operation. Seeing a definite need here in Australia, a quick look at the current specs of the player showed it could handle the 240V/50hz Aussie power, and the PAL television system, so there shouldn’t be too much involved to get it on our shores.
A barrage of emails to every email address I could find for anyone who did anything with Clearplay finally got me in contact with the Clearplay International operation, who, are bringing the goodness of Clearplay to the rest of us.
I quickly got to the point that I wanted to help spearhead the import of this wonderful product to Australia and got a nice response:
Many thanks for your e-mail enquiring about ClearPlay, our colleagues in the US have asked me to respond to you.
ClearPlay International NV is responsible for building the ClearPlay business outside the US and we are interested in working with distribution and marketing partners.
Today, we are focusing expansion planning on those countries where evidence exists that consumers and opinion leaders are actively concerned about ‘objectionable’ content in the entertainment programming that they and their families receive, and where those consumers would be interested in more choice and control. If you have such information, it will help us to evaluate/determine if Australia should be among our first expansion markets.
For your information, we are developing a BluRay version and attached is an overview of ClearPlay Connect, the new application for BluRay players.
Many thanks once again for your interest.
Yours sincerely,
(name removed by me for obvious reasons)So, I’m gonna give it my all and see what I can do to help clean up living rooms Australia-wide.
Will keep you posted...
0 comments:
Post a Comment