Good read from NewTeeVee regarding Redbox (possibly) now feeling the affect of Netflix streaming.

Direct link:
http://gigaom.com/video/redbox-q4-miss/

From the piece:

For years, Redbox has been flying high with DVD kiosks that offered cut-rate movie rentals for $1 a day. But Redbox might want to launch a digital rental service soon, before it sees its DVD kiosk business affected by Netflix and other services that allow consumers to rent and purchase movies from the comfort of their own homes.

The writer notes that Redbox is hoping their new Blu-ray offerings at $1.50 a rented disk would create more business. To me though, this goes against the demo that I see using Redbox. I'm not privy to their marketing data, but my belief is Redbox caters to less tech savvy folks, and in a lot of cases, less affluent folks. Most probably don't have Blu-ray players.

Heck, I'm personally very tech savvy (and a filmmaker) and I just in the last six months bought a Blu-ray player. Funny thing too, the main reason I bought it was for its Internet capabilities. I primarily use it to stream Netflix movies (and I don't do this very often either - I mainly watch AT&T U-Verse free VOD). I think I've rented one Blu-ray from Netflix when I first got the player.

Personally, and this is really for another post, but I've always though that Blu-ray will be a short lived format. Everything is obviously going VOD via Netflix, AppleTV, iTunes, "The Cloud", etc. Who really wants to rebuild their DVD movie collection from scratch?

Although I will say I do think physical disks will be around for many more years (primarily DVDs). I mean, when the US gov't switched all TV broadcast to digital back in 2009 I was shocked at how many people still got their TV over the air - do you think these folks have Blu-ray players (or even an Internet connection)?

-Blake

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