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Redbox Teams With CinemaNow
Mon Nov 16, 2009 at 06:00 PM ETTags: Industry Trends, Redbox, CinemaNow (all tags)
Redbox and CinemaNow have announced they’re currently testing a program to determine the consumer demand for digital distribution.
With a good chunk of the studios and most of the video rental world at its heels, Redbox needs all the friends it can get. CinemaNow, on the other hand, seems to be hooking up with just about everyone these days. Together, they’re hoping to gauge the mass market demand for digital delivery.
Frequent customers of Redbox kiosks, and those who buy certain prepaid packages, will be given gift cards that will let them redeem titles on Roxio’s CinemaNow service. Representatives from Redbox would not say how far reaching the initiative is, but they did state that the program started on October 29th.
“We think this is a space that we should be testing in and understand better,” said Paul Davis, CEO of Redbox’s parent company Coinstar. “It’s an interesting space that we’d like to explore.”
CinemaNow appears to be the company that will receive the most benefit from the arrangement. After the announcement last week that the CinemaNow service would be embedded into electronics sold at Best Buy, this move seems to cater towards a different, but just as noteworthy, demographic.
Source: Video Business
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Redbox Sued Over Multi-Day Rental Fees
Wed Oct 28, 2009 at 04:00 PM ETTags: Redbox (all tags)
Redbox is in court again, but this time it’s consumers that are suing. A class action lawsuit filed in an Illinois circuit court alleges that Redbox illegally collected over $100 million in rental fees for discs that were returned after the 24 hour rental period.
Customers upset with the fees they paid for rentals have taken Redbox to court. Based on the advertising slogan that promised “$1 a night DVD Rentals” with “no late fees… ever”, customers are accusing the company of misrepresenting the actual fees of using the service.
The court document states that two classes of Redbox customers are represented. The first are customers that returned their DVDs after the designated 24 hour time and were made to pay for an additional day. These customers claim that the fee charged for an additional rental day are excessive.
The second class of customers represented is made of people that were charged the maximum amount of $25. This fee is charged only when a DVD is severely late or missing. The customers claim that $25 for a missing DVD is far above what a retail DVD would cost and three times the amount of a used DVD from Redbox, and that this fee too is excessive.
The suit involves counts of statutory fraud by omission, unfair practice, unlawful penalties, and violations of Illinois rental and contract laws.
Source: Courthouse News (PDF)
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Redbox Tests Disc Sales Through Kiosks
Tue Oct 20, 2009 at 01:00 PM ETTags: Redbox, Industry Trends, High-Def Retailing (all tags)
In a move that’s a bit less appealing than their ever popular $1 rental kiosks, Redbox has announced DVD sales kiosks.
Clad in black rather than the iconic red, the new “Vidigo” kiosks will test consumer desire to make full DVD and Blu-ray purchases through kiosks. While no definitive information exists on Blu-ray pricing, DVDs will run between $19.95 and $20.95.
Current Vidigo kiosks are essentially Redbox kiosks colored black, but the new kiosks will be designed with space in mind, and will be smaller and slimmer. The new space saving design was created with the hope that Vidigo kiosks will be featured in convenience stores rather than large retail locations.
These ‘sell through’ kiosks would be in direct competition with stores that already sell DVDs, but certainly appeal to studios like Fox and Warner who have less than favorable opinions of the Redbox rental kiosks.
Source: Video Business
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