Redbox, the company that offers physical movie rentals via kiosks around the United States, today launched a new digital Redbox On Demand service designed better compete with other digital TV and movie services.
Redbox On Demand, available as a public beta, allows customers to rent or purchase movies and TV shows for streaming. The service offers many of the same new-release movies that are available from physical Redbox locations, along with additional content.
Redbox previously had a digital streaming service called Redbox Instant in partnership with Verizon, but it shut down in 2014 after being unable to compete with offerings like Netflix. Redbox has been testing its new On Demand service, which focuses on rentals and outright purchases, since July of 2016.
Pricing for new-release on-demand rentals from Redbox starts at $3.99 for 48 hours of access, but most new titles are priced at $5.99, with Redbox charging $1 more for high-definition content. Movie purchases are also available at prices starting at $9.99, and can be downloaded for offline viewing.
Redbox's rental prices are similar to rental prices from iTunes, Amazon, and other digital movie rental services.
Redbox On Demand is available from the Redbox website, through the Redbox app for Android and iOS, and it is accessible on the Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, and smart TVs from LG and Samsung.
While Redbox On Demand content can be watched on iOS devices and the Apple TV, content needs to be purchased through the Redbox website.
Top Rated Comments
Or, with physical copies, are they assuming most people won’t return the disk within a day, and therefore will make the same amount of money as a digital rental? If so, I feel bad (not really), as Redbox is definitely losing money on me whenever I partake of The Box (which isn’t often, these days).
I wanted my movie to be $1.99 to rent digitally when it was a new release and $.99 when on sale. I wanted volume, not profit per rental. But I had no say.
I think it’s a misconception because App developers can set their own price. Movies and books cannot, by law, set their own price. The percentages are the same, with Apple taking a 30% cut, but a 30% cut of the price that THEY choose, as long as it is above our wholesale price. I had our distributor lower our wholesale price as low as they would go and all of the stores stayed firm on rental prices. Amazon was the only store who lowered our full digital purchase price.
I believe the wholesale price was $4.99 and Amazon was the only one who sold for $7.99 to own. XBox and PSN were still selling the movie for $19.99 and iTunes was still selling at $12.99. When we’d make a sale, we’d still get our 70% of the higher price... but we were not asking for that behind the scenes.
The system is stupid. I’m pretty sure it is like this because of the e-book collusion case with Apple. So now everyone has to let each store set its own prices but the greediest of the big studios set higher wholesale prices, so the digital stores raise the prices of ALL new releases to normalize the prices of all movies making a consistent (and consistently high) price whether you are buying an indie or Star Wars.