Redbox is showing its customers some love by offering a special 1-day promotion for a free rental Thursday, March 8, 2012. If you slept on Oscar nominees/winners like Moneyball and Midnight in Paris or snubbed picks like Drive, this would be a great time to schedule some time and rush to your local kiosk before someone else nabs that flick.
Just use the code THANKS2U
Be sure to check Redbox.com regularly for promotions in the future.
Source: redbox
It turns out that Redbox understands movie lovers: if we don’t catch a film in theaters, we want to watch it as soon as possible when it comes out on DVD Blu-ray. Unfortunately, studios have yet to realize the evolving consumer/market is not the same it was years ago.
Earlier this year, Warner Brothers proposed a deal with Redbox that would impose a 56 day delay between retailer release and rental availability. Rather than agreeing to these terms in an exchange for discounted discs, Redbox has decided to take its ball and go home. As a result, Redbox will have to purchase titles from retailers at a bulk price. The first Warner Brothers title Redbox plans to make available after finding a new source is “A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas“, which comes out February 7, 2012.
Come April, eyes will be on Universal Pictures as their deal with Redbox expires. Currently, Universal’s release window is 28 days and there is no word yet if that length will be doubled.
A few questions remain:
Will these rentals be the retail versions with all bonus features?
Will this added cost be transferred to customers?
Will availability of these new Warner Brothers discs be more limited than others?
Rather than fighting with content distributors like Redbox and Netflix, studios might be better off dropping windows. It’s no secret that consumers are cutting back. We can no longer afford to buy a title that may only be watched once after purchase. Sometimes we pass on watching a movie in the theaters because the reviews don’t justify the cost of a ticket and that rationale certainly wouldn’t change when the Blu-ray release is even more than a ticket. How about we just accept purchases are for hardcore collectors and rentals are for casual watchers and just release them both into the wild at same time?
UPDATE (2/8/2012): It looks like Redbox has pushed back the release 1 week to 2/14/2012. Source: redbox
Do you guys remember when we used to get a 20 ounce soda for a buck? Life was easy. A single dollar bill was all we needed. Then inflation kicked in and we started having to ask our friends or kind strangers for change because that dollar bill was no longer enough.
Prices bumps are never good news but they are often a necessary evil for businesses to remain profitable. Today Redbox announced it too will become that vending machine by bumping it’s rate. The good news is that the price hike only affects DVDs. While we’re probably years away from DVDs being the new laserdisc, the narrowing price gap between DVD and Blu-ray rentals may help adoption rate for the latter. For 30 cents more, why not watch movies in glorious high definition? Perhaps we’ll also see a shift in inventory for available titles on Blu-ray. One can only hope.
If you’ve been hesitating to rent a movie, head over to your local kiosk soon. The new price starts 10/31/2011