Redbox Streaming Service To Shut Down October 7th 64
An anonymous reader writes: Redbox, the company behind the giant red boxes at malls and grocery stores that dispense DVD and game rentals, partnered with Verizon in 2013 to launch a video streaming service to compete with Netflix. This naturally led to accusations that Verizon was throttling Netflix to tilt the scales in favor of Redbox. Well, as of Tuesday, they're packing it in. Redbox's streaming service will shut down at the end of the day on October 7th. They'll be refunding all current customers, though that number took a hit over the past several months as a credit card fraud problem caused Redbox to shut down their billing servers. This meant no new customers could sign up, and existing customers couldn't renew their subscriptions.
I didn't know it existed... (Score:2)
Re:I didn't know it existed... (Score:4, Funny)
Nobody can compete with Francis Underwood! Well you can, but you might die in a mysterious subway accident.
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"I didn't know it existed..."
I think you answered your own question in the subject...
Competing with Netflix is "easy" - if you are willing to outspend them on advertising and content while offering streaming at a lower price, and somehow stealing their mostly satisfied customers in a near-saturated market. Doing it *profitably* is another story - which is why the giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc haven't bothered trying...
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As long as I can't stream any movie I want, the market for streaming isn't even remotely saturated in any sense of the term.
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The market for $8 "all you can eat" streaming? It's very saturated in many senses of the term. Basically, you get what you pay for at that price.
And you can in fact stream (almost) any movie you want, you just have to be willing to pay what the owner of the movie wants to charge you for it, which for new releases is not part of "$8 all you can eat". You want better/cheaper? Fine, but that's not something in the hands of the companies like Netflix or Redbox, it's entirely in the hands of the studios who
Re: I didn't know it existed... (Score:2)
I just don't understand the $8 streaming concept. You pretty much just get old TV shows and crap movies. I'd gladly pay $25 a month for decent and current movies. I have Netflix and like watching some old TV shows, but I rarely watch movies, since it's almost impossible to find anything good.
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The issue is with studio contracts and provider risks. The studios want $4-6 per rental of their new releases and aren't willing to negotiate a (reasonable) flat rate to subscription providers. Netflix wants to keep their costs down and isn't willing to take the risk of offering a more expensive service and hoping customers don't abuse it.
People who are expecting this situation to eventually get sorted out are going to wait a LOOONG time. The fact is the studios have a model that is designed to pay for t
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As far as their original content, seems like Netflix has had the perfect combination of risk-taking, intelligent choices, and a bit of luck.
I read an interview with Kevin Spacey where he said after pitching House of Cards to all of the network and cable channels with lukewarm reception, Netflix jumped all over it. Not only that, when they said, "ok, we'll go film a pilot", Netflix said, "pilot? Forget that, here's $100M, go film a full season. Oh, and we won't mess with your creative vision, we trust you
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HBO can only be a significant streaming service if they ditch the cable/sat subscription requirement for access to HBO Go.
Cue someone calling you an idiot because you "just don't understand HBO's business model."
I'm sure they'd be along already if this story were still on the front page. They probably won't go away entirely until HBO is in bankruptcy court and/or ends up being purchased by Netflix. Denial is strong in these people.
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The problem with this model is that it doesn't account for the back catalog titles which aren't available streaming, either, or only show up for a month or two and then disappear.
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Well, there are a *lot* of problems with this model, not saying it's great, just the way it currently works ;)
Though there are still a lot of titles out there which aren't available just because they have not yet been remastered for digital streaming, or they have not sorted out all of the various licensing and copyright agreements. Amazingly, streaming often requires getting completely different licensing/royalty agreements from all involved parties like the musical score, poster artwork, screenwriters, a
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Re-mastering for digital streaming?
My guess is this is something streaming services do themselves so that the content is pre-optimized for their specific streaming system and codecs.
Just about anything that's been on DVD ever should be "ready for digital streaming" which basically amounts to the streamer transcoding it themselves from the source file that the rights holder has.
I think the bigger issue is the rights holder stuff, which I think would be cleared up if studios and a handful of hollywood asshole
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I'm not entirely sure what the process is for converting films to digital video.
My suspicion is that the studio does this.
Based on the complaints about many early DVDs, I would wager that a lot were merely telecined -- a good print of the film was literally run through a projector and captured by a digital video camera. Any obvious glitches were edited out (reel changes, etc) and the final product was put through an MPEG2 compressor and used for mastering the DVD. It wouldn't surprise me if even some earl
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The issue is with studio contracts and provider risks. The studios want $4-6 per rental of their new releases and aren't willing to negotiate a (reasonable) flat rate to subscription providers
This is why streaming sucks. This is why it's inferior to the older discs method, and it's entirely because the studios have too much control over streaming and pricing, and therefore they fuck it up. For the last eight years I've been able to rent almost anything I wanted from Netflix for a reasonable price. Now we try shifting to online streaming and we can say goodbye to a good thing.
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You can get mostly "decent and current" but it happens on cable's premium channels and its a lot more that $25. Still, you don't get _all_ the "decent and current" as a lot of what goes thru theaters (I see almost everything except the stuff too stupid for words - Transformers, for instance) still never comes out on even the premium channels. For instance, 2 similar movies, "Olympus has Fallen" and "White House Down" seem to be very different, with "White House Down" all over the premiums, easily obtai
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As it happens, Olympus Has Fallen is on Netflix, presumably exclusively.
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If its "exclusively", that might explain why its not on the premiums on the cable.
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And they're all available on netflix's disk service, which they're inexplicably trying to kill off before having the streaming nailed down.
If you want to see one of the good movies made before last month on the streaming service, well.. good luck, it might be on there for a couple weeks some time. If all you want is a Japanese film student's knockoff of one of those good movies, though, you've got hundreds of choices.
That series thing is pretty good though.
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I also never knew it existed. Everyone is aware of NetFlix; a lot of people also know about Amazon Prime's video services, but most people don't seem to use it.
You can't compete if nobody knows that your service is out there.
Re: I didn't know it existed... (Score:2)
I have Verizon TV and have seen commercials for it, but still didn't know what it was exactly. Or cared enough to find out. Verizon already rented movies via the VOD, so seemed pointless.
Customers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't let your customers send you money, then there's not much point in being in business. Also, whoever was responsible for setting up their payment system won't be laying claim to that fact in their advertising and testimonial material.
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If you can't let your customers send you money, then there's not much point in being in business. Also, whoever was responsible for setting up their payment system won't be laying claim to that fact in their advertising and testimonial material.
RedBox was a scam. It wasn't a technical issue that shut them down. It was most likely the number of charge-backs that did. I'm just surprised that it took this long.
They would frequently email you rental coupon codes that allowed you to rent a movie for free (which really, was the only reason I'd get a movie from them, their selection was mostly B movies that you had already seen, or that you wouldn't bother to rent in the first place, so when I had a free code, I'd force myself to to go through their sele
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Why wasn't that encoded into the packaging, instead of a "you lose if you're not diligent, no take backs" question?
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The problem was that RedBox was being used to validate credit card numbers after hackers stole a pile of them. Somehow it was a really efficient way to check your millions of credit cards to see which ones were valid. RedBox caught on and disabled it, which had the e
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Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin...
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I came to win, battle me that's a sin...
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Apparently Redbox will be gaining weight soon
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LOL.
It's still people trying to use the unlimited Internet service they paid for, of course Verizon will keep throttling them.
Throttling (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the accusations were just adding the reason. It was already well known that Verizon has been throttling Netflix for years.
Well (Score:3)
Don't forget Verizon bought Intel OnCue in January (Score:1)
It was probably a tossup whether Verizon would roll whatever OnCue was to become into the Redbox brand, and then came the Redbox billing clusterf*ck, which made the decision for them.
Verizon has no need for two streaming video services.
Mission Acomplished (Score:2)
Verizon and the rest of the cable/telco cartel have succeeded in extorting rents from Netflix, so now they have no need for an alternate service. A content play was never a natural move for Verizon. Much easier and much more profitable to simply shake down the two or three leading streaming services -- but until they were able to do that, having something like Redbox streaming was an important part of their threat.
Redbox streaming likely only existed to use as a threat: "nice little business you've got he
Rebox had a streaming service? (Score:2)
I didnt know. Fire the advertising department before its too late, oh, nevermind.
Re:You know what's crazy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people don't have a broadband connection to support streaming media. It is a lot cheaper to rent a DVD or three each month than to support a broadband connection. It doesn't make them crazy.
Some people watch movies and other things that aren't available on streaming, but are available on DVD. It doesn't make them crazy.
Now, it is true that there are a lot of crazy people who don't have a broadband connection. And there are a lot of crazy people who watch movies and other things that aren't available on streaming. But that doesn't imply that renting DVDs is proof of being crazy.
It may just be a symptom!
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Well, you can't really rent a blu-ray quality movie for a long time anywhere else. Unless you want to wait another 1-3 months, that is. And you happen to be on an ISP that isn't throttling the hell out of whatever video service you want to rent it from.
Phrasing! (Score:3)
Will the icon finally go away? (Score:1)
Does this mean I can finally get rid of the Redbox ad on my Playstations?