Redbox Owner Chicken Soup for the Soul Files for Chapter 11
deadline.com
deadline.com
But I was also pretty young so maybe I just missed that part.
> In 2008, the founders, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, sold the company to a new ownership group led by William J. Rouhana and Robert D. Jacobs.[20]
I don't know anything beyond that but to me this reads like: finance guys looking to pull off sort of a "media rollup [1]" start by buying a well-known brand, name the company after it, then buy a fairly random assortment of ill-fitting (and in the case of Redbox, just plain doomed) media properties. And, here we are at the predictable end.
I will say it’s pretty rare I get that itch these days, since basically any movie is instantly available.
Hits harder when you’re in the middle of nowhere with terrible internet though. Even then though half the time someone has offline stuff on some device
If life circumstances get away from you and you get to the point where the one provider wired to your area, like spectrum say, gets turned off for non payment after months of ignored bills, you may well find yourself without any plausible path to have the resources to turn it back on.
All it takes is a life based on something like shift or manual work and a medical or family crisis.
People really have no idea what life is actually like in most of this country it seems.
I have starlink, but i live in the middle of a national forest and there's no place to put the dish where it doesn't have service interruptions. It's great for downloading things, but awful at nearly everything else, such as realtime communication, quickly looking things up via a series of browser tabs, and online gaming.
My only other option is hughesnet; and i don't consider 1500ms ping times and severe 2000s era bandwidth caps and speeds to really be an option. T-mo doesn't have penetration for "wireless home internet", nor verizon, i have tried both. There's 3+ fiber runs along the highway near my house (highway in name only!). One is a backhaul for centurylink - no consumer access. Another is Suddenlink - they got a tax benefit for running fiber to public schools, and are not tapping the lines for any consumers. at&t has the third line, but they want $15,000 for a loop, and at the time i was researching it, at&t wanted ~$1,200/mo for 1gbit and $8900 for 10gbit. Fortunately Optimum is currently running a fourth fiber line down the same highway, and my understanding is they charge $155 for 1gbit service.
Currently, for the garbage internet service i have here, i am paying over $300/month. thankfully that gets reduced tomorrow, as i won't be able to get service from at&t even if i wanted to. As someone who could 40% utilize a gbit connection 24/7 at-will, this is extremely frustrating. The tradeoff is i live in a rainforest and 90% of the time there's no indication that other humans exist around here.
ymmv, my FICO is available upon triplicate request.
I'm kind of "at two" with a lot of the cloud religion; I'm intimately aware that it's a first world problem and that the cloud as we know it is a North American / Western European phenomenon. Sure, talk to anyone anywhere in the world and "the cloud is great" but it doesn't mean the same thing when the nearest cloudy datacenter is 500 miles and an international border away. Or even in Eastern Washington State.
I had two internet feeds until last year. One was DSL, with two fixed IPv4 addresses; the other was broadband. The DSL had some advantages, although throughput was not one of them.
A couple of years ago some meth head cut the cable head (right down to the ground! a couple pounds of copper??) out of a punchdown box by the side of the road. CenturyLink fixed it, but I think it was the beginning of the end. Last year they gave notice that copper line service could stop at any time without notice and wouldn't be restored.
Luckily the local option broadband operator (who leases a /17 from the City, we'll get to that) decided to make an offer that was too good to be true at about that time: $116/mo for 500mbit and two free fixed addresses to go with it.
Unfortunately Rainier Connect / Lightcurve can't competently operate reverse DNS, preferring to impersonate the lessor's /16 rather than configure 128 /24s. The PTR space is littered with defunct resolutions for customers they have lost. And the lessor, the City of Tacoma, won't accept email from their own address space so there's nobody to complain to. I've manage to shame / embarrass Lightcurve enough that they fixed some other egregious issues.
For some silly reason (besides the fact that I offer a TCP table plugin for Postfix which supports nontrivial aliases) I want email-at-rest to be on computers which I own on premises I own, and proper reverse DNS is necessary for that.
In conclusion, even in the first world with a cloudy datacenter virtually down the street the necessary business predicates to correct technical implementation and operation aren't universally present. If you look hard at the cloud and squint you can see it there, too.
So i stop by the redbox sometimes, but the only thing i ever rented out of them was games. I played skyrim and fallout 4 via redbox, for example, back when they came out for playstation.
I didn't have broadband until I moved out (this was long after broadband was widely available), dial-up was the only option because AT&T never bothered to install the equipment that would enable DSL for our address. Today, 15 years later, their only options aside from dial-up are cellular data plans and satellite Internet, which are sub-par, prohibitively expensive, or both.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/06/13/mobile-techn...
I thought it might work well in a small town, but they required 10k daily people foot traffic to qualify for a kiosk
https://funnybusiness.substack.com/p/how-americas-most-inspi...
The market for inspirational literature includes many religious people in general, and they had no reason to exclude stories infused with religious or Christian content, but most of the many books were not Christian themed per se (although some explicitly were).
That they admitted Christian stories at all, or sometimes used striaghtforward Christian references in some titles or prefaces was enough to make them unpalatable to some, of course.
No idea how connected the two companies still are.
Quacks.
I think that's "HN Bubble" talking, though. I see a lot of older and arguably poorer people using RedBoxes; after all, streaming is more expensive.
Meanwhile no streaming service will ever get Bob to sign up.
As an silly example: no one rents carpet cleaners every weekend, you can still rent carpet cleaning machines. There is enough demand in aggregate for it to be viable.
Could you start a Redbox from scratch? I kind of doubt it. I think the costs would overwhelm you. But that’s not the position they’re in.
I’m not saying you’re going to become a fortune 500 company on the business model. But I think there’s enough for a real business to survive there, depending on the areas where you place the kiosks.
However Redbox has history and the agreements may not be as favorable to them as they would need to keep operating, or they may have a lot more debt than necessary.
There are a lot of Bobs out there though. It’s not a big theoretical.
For another, it used to be the case that Redbox would have things well before you could stream them, or when they could only be streamed expensively. Various waves of the distributors making it more annoying for Redbox to buy the discs, pushing things to their own streaming services very early, and just generally the downturn of physical video media all blunted those positives though.
I used to use it semi-regularly for Blu-rays even not that long ago, but the kiosks around me have started to go away and the available selection and timing of releases is way worse than it used to be.
They really just have everything working against them: the ongoing huge shift to streaming, the pandemic and strikes putting holes in the release calendar, Marvel and DC both stumbling, interest rates...
That was a very big differentiator.
(I have no idea how to turn this into any sort of law but companies really shouldn't be allowed to just dive into debt, conquer a market via selling dollar bills for 75 cents, then collapse into a puff of compounded interest and massive losses and destroy the entire segment they are in as they collapse. I suppose just not having interest rates at effectively 0 will likely do the trick eventually.)
Otoh, it does kind or suck when it seems to destroy the whole segment, as sometimes happens.
Even if you have streaming subscription(s) you have to break out your abacus to determine if your service(s) have rights to the movie this month.
That being said, I have no idea what are their expenses. On the surface, it feels like they should have low costs, so I might be making wild assumptions. Or maybe there is a Bain Capital like situation behind the scenes intentionally destroying the business.,
Umm, I'm thinking, but the best I can come up with:
1. Rural/extremely out-of-the-way locations. Which means that locating a Redbox that is profitable is going to be extremely difficult because by definition you're in low-density areas.
2. Extremely poor people. Even most lower class people have cell phones these days where you can watch video, so the number of people in reasonably dense areas who can't afford broadband is going to be very low.
I do think the "multiple subscription services" issue is a valid point, but in general I think that most Redbox users are likely just slow adopters, similar to folks with landlines. The problem is that customer base slowly but surely goes away.
Rural people who can't get internet at home likely can't get good cell service at home either. You only have to be a few miles off of the main roads before service degrades rapidly.
Also, the unbanked. People who have money but bad or no credit.
But all that said, while it might still be possible to make some money with DVD rental vending in 2024, but it's not a growth business at all.
I love you John, but you're definitely an oddball! I say that with full affection from a fellow oddball :-)
Like coin exchangers and lottery scratcher machines, Redbox kiosks exist pretty much wherever the bulk of a community buys stuff for their fridge: supermarket, dollar store, convenience store, etc.
They're extremely well distributed.
And until Starlink, which is new and expensive and unfamiliar, many more (North American) communities than you think did not offer home broadband that was suitable for reliable streaming. Service was still traditional satellite, weak DSL, and maybe 3G in many places.
Plus, what made Redbox appealing to many was that you could spend a few dollars for a familiar, popular film when you had a few dollars to spare instead of committing to a whole bunch of recurring subscriptions just to hope that the title you want would eventually come up.
Certainy, the business model as a whole is becoming increasingly strained, but it continues to serve consumer needs that still aren't serviced vert well by anybody else. It's a sort of crossover point, but if the company collapses instead of restructures, it's going to disappoint and frustrate quite a lot of people.
They had as many as 42,000 kiosks. Tens of thousanda remain. They are used every day. Yet the future of the company looks bleak and the finances are in crisis. All those things can be true at once.
If your local library is well funded, most new titles appear on shelves pretty quickly after release.
The target demographics of people who can't afford or for whom internet is totally unavailable for streaming are much better served by their public library. It's generally funded by your city, county, or property taxes and pretty much any resident of the locality gets free access.
That leaves extremely rural locations as a target for Redbox, which is generally a pretty small market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chicken_Soup_for_the_S...
Had no idea the book series bought Redbox, lol
In that both services were relatively easy to use to get DVDs, they're similar.