https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/29/24188785/redbox-bankruptcy-filing-dvds-chicken-soup-soul-entertainment
It owes money to Universal, Sony, Lionsgate, Warner Bros., and more.
The last couple of times I went to a Redbox, I felt like all the movies were knock offs. To be fair, I have no idea if this is because they were or because I don't really watch advertisements and have no idea what's out.
I give the redbox a passing glance as I leave the grocery store to see which movies I should pirate. Rarely do I see something worth the effort.
300 million dollars of debt accrued per year. How are they losing so much money? Isn’t the point of Redbox that it has nearly 0 overhead? I’m imagining a field in Nebraska with kiosks arranged in identically spaced rows of length indescribable, warping along with the light whose freedom they’ve stolen. The crimson horde stand in opposition to the very nature of space, a concatenation in both part and whole, clawing at the space where sanity ends and reason begins.
And even then, their overhead would only be like $53 per month.
They more than likely took loans out to buy tbe dvds in bulk instead of paying up front. That’s why everyone in hollywood is owed money, they paid a bit up front and then promised the rest later.
I think it's that the parent company took out huge loans to buy Redbox. And that's the streaming service they setup has ongoing costs and overhead, like licencing. And the loans they took out to make their own content.
I used to rent dvds from them regularly. Then one day I rented a dvd, got home, and discovered that someone had photocopied the barcode, put it on a blanc disc, returned that, and kept the dvd for themselves. While redbox customer service was able to refund my money, I stopped renting through them before too much longer.
They could have just copied the dvd without stealing it.
I mean, they could have sailed the high seas instead of resorting to lowly thievery.
How can they still operate with 1B in debt? There's no way they are ever going to be able to repay that in a reasonable time frame
If they're gonna go outta business soon, I better keep an eye on this. I could get some real cheap movies, even though I doubt there will be anything I'd watch. I could relive the days where my family was able to keep a physical DVD from back in the ancient times when Netflix was not a streaming service.
Edit: Netflix was a scam artist even back then! Brought this up with my mother and she said Netflix charges us for the price of the DVD!
If I had the space and money to buy a Redbox machine, I would just so I could have one of the coolest storage devices for all my DVDs.
That’s the function of my NAS, the bonus is it holds significantly more movies and doesn’t cost anything to rent 🏴☠️
Yeah, I knew the point, but then I realized my NAS in the basement is basically a more convenient Redbox with more movies for free and wanted to brag about piracy. It’s just so good. It would be cool to have a Redbox machine but tbh I’d really prefer one of those Netflix CDN boxes.
Network Attached Storage. A computer on a network designed to store files people work on. It usually has several hard drives that work together for extra speed and redundancy if a hard drive fails.
A Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a storage device that is put on a computer network, so different users can access it. Think of it as your own personal cloud.
I think the implication was they wanted the actual physical part, not just access to lots of movies
Re-thinking it, I think that would be kinda cool.
It's not far off from people who own jukeboxes
Burning all the DVDs would be a pain in the ass, but I do have most of a spindle that I haven't touched since...2013?
No, if you're going to have a DVD jukebox, you're going to buy them. No burning. You can get tons of great random movies from pawn shops and other stores. That would be half the fun of it.
Naw, if I'm going to have a DVD jukebox, it's gonna be as bootleg as it gets. Converting AVIs to whatever the fuck format DVD players understand was a pain in the ass then, I'm sure converting MKVs backwards to the same format is still equally annoying, but it's the principle of the thing.
Jellyfin is open source, so if you have the hardware and know .NET C (? I'm guessing on this part), it could be
Edit; I guessed wrong
Just check ebay, most movies that are a few years old can be found for under $5 shipped. I still go back to DVD/Bluray copies of my favorite movies sometimes since content changes so often on streaming services.
That's how I got my favorite CD and Discman, among other things. If I ever get serious about collecting, I'm definitely going through them because I haven't had any problems (that they could prevent) with their services since I started getting things on them this year.