Have you seen these new Redboxes around town? There are only a few in San Francisco, so perhaps it’s not too much of a slight against me that I’d never heard of them before, but what the hell? An overnight DVD rental for only one dollar?
Furthermore, you can reserve a copy of a movie online, then go to the nearest Redbox kiosk and pick it up. If you don’t return the rental by 9 PM the next day, you’re only charged an extra dollar plus tax per day it goes unreturned. These guys have Netflix squarely in their sights; their website even features the same shade of red that Netflix uses. With fees so low, can this possibly work?
Apparently it works well enough for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to jump on-board; they signed a deal with Redbox a short while ago to offer their library of movies to the growing service, which has distributors of other media companies eyeing the company warily. It seems crazy to price rentals as low as this, but perhaps that’s the price for competing with BitTorrent and the continually popping-up free online movie streams. Of course, the library is fairly limited as yet, but a dollar per rental seems too good to just pass by. And if the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that if something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
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