Redbox Goes Digital In Netflix Pursuit
Popular DVD vendors Redbox look set to take a leap into the online streaming world to again become a direct rival to rental giant Netflix, the company confirmed yesterday.
Redbox going digital
Whilst meeting with analysts, the President of Redbox, Mitch Lowe, claimed that his company’s new digital option is to be a ‘subscription-based Internet streaming’ service, as opposed to their usual ‘vending machine’ methods.
The main business plan involves customers providing a monthly subscription fee that would allow them to watch films on a variety of platforms, as well as being able to rent discs via their famed kiosks.
This development will lead Redbox into a lucrative and untapped market for them, and will see them go toe-to-toe with rental rival Netflix, although they will have a long way to go to challenge the 20 million subscribers that Netflix enjoys through its DVD-by-mail, and online streaming subscription plans for customers.
They are planning to move into the digital market with a marketing partner, and although it has not yet been decided as to who this will be, the frontrunner for the role is rumoured to be amazon.com.
Investors in Redbox had been pushing for a digital service launch for a while now, due to consumers taking an increasing interest in online streaming as their method of watching movies via rental, as opposed to the physical formats of DVD or Blu-Ray.
Revenue for Redbox had been lower than expected at the end of last year, after three studios decided to wait 28 days after their DVD release date before granting a sales licence to the Coinstar subsidary. This recent misery on the DVD front was added to when Disney insisted on higher wholesale prices for all of their discs being sold to the company.
Seems they read our post about the decline of DVD and think that moving to streaming will change their fortunes. Question is though, is it a little too late?
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This is irresponsible reporting. If history proves correct everytime some negative press comes out about Redbox (like Disney raising rates) Mitch announces a streaming service (2years running now).
And if you listened to the analyst event they announced nothing other then we are in talks. Well of course they are because they have been plugging this for 2 years now and are no closer today then two years ago. The fact reamins Amazon would not need Redbox for a streaming service and it’s rediculous to believe that any studio would be willing to give redbox any content for a streaming service.
This whole story is fluff!!!!