Redbox Gets Bought: Another Success For Good Service At A Good Price
from the doing-things-the-right-way dept
Redbox, the company that rents DVDs out of automated kiosks for $1 per night, has been bought for up to $176 million by its biggest investor, Coinstar. It was hard to dislike Redbox: the company was having a lot of success in a space where other companies hadn't, by creating a convenient and easy to use service that delivered at a great price. Plus, anything that gets Hollywood's knickers in an enormous twist generally is pretty good. Universal Studios, in particular, tried to hamper Redbox through threats leading to lawsuits (update: clarified that Redbox filed the lawsuit... in response to a threat from Universal), perhaps hoping to kill the company off before launching rental kiosks of its own. But rather than try to destroy Redbox, Hollywood (and plenty of other people) should learn from it: the way to success isn't by putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of your customers' happiness, it's by providing them a service they want, delivered in an easy way, with a lot of value.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: dvds, good service, mergers
Companies: coinstar, redbox
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It was Redbox, not Universal, that sued
Actually, it was *Redbox* that sued Universal:
http://www.eff.org/files/Redbox%20v%20Universal_Complaint.pdf
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Re: It was Redbox, not Universal, that sued
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None of that? Perhaps you guys want to argue that Redbox should be illegal? I mean, if big copyright doesn't like it, it must be bad for the country right?
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No, in fact it didn't say much beyond the movie description. However, since every single DVD release of the film includes two discs, it stands to reason that when Redbox bought their copies, they got the second discs for each one. It's not so outrageous to believe that they would include both discs rather than just chuck a few million copies of the second disc. And yes, the copies they had were from the 2-disc releases because the movie disc was labelled as Disc 1.
Your friend (which we assume is you) is an idiot. Did you think it was going to give you the fancy box and paper inserts too?
You assume incorrectly. There are very few movies I like enough to spend money on and if there is one, I'll wait until I can buy a normal retail copy from the bargain bin or the local flea market. Most of the time, I'd just download it.
And as I pointed out above, there was no reason to assume that the second disc wouldn't be included. Redbox could easily fit two discs in their kiosk boxes.
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hollywood rocks!
AND 5 DAY RENTAL FOR ONLY 4.29 SO TECHNICALY ITS CHEAPER THEN REDBOX AND OFFER MORE DAYS TO KEET YOUR RENTAL!
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redboxprofits.com/intro
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