I had no idea this book had a company and that the company owned Redbox. Wasn’t their original products Christian themed inspirational novels about people coming back from the dead, with a different version for every demographic?
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.
But I was also pretty young so maybe I just missed that part.
https://funnybusiness.substack.com/p/how-americas-most-inspi...
> 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
Quacks.
No idea how connected the two companies still are.