Redbox is DEAD… but the Kiosk still works?!?

This whole redbox situation is so strange... they supposedly shut down a few months ago, so how did I find this? Let me know if you have any recent experiences with redbox!

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[SmokinSilicon]

Anyone else still have a Redbox kiosk nearby?
Btw, after this video, we went to more Redbox Kiosks... a LOT more. Update video later this week 👀

[ericbazinga]

I'm so disconnected from modern news and culture that this is how I found out Redbox went out of business.

[Danielau]

2:45 Redbox didn't charge late fees. They'd keep charging the daily rate until you had paid the full value of the movie, then they'd stop charging for it.

[marksutter]

The death of physical media feels like the beginning of the end for individual ownership.

[crushermach]

Honestly, these seem like great little miniature libraries. In fact if some of the more rural libraries that can't open daily can get ahold of some of these they might make a great addition. Just put in new and high demand discs every so often and they'd be pretty much set. Only thing to figure out would be making it read library cards and eventually it'd need maintenance.

[punchbuggy]

I work at my local library where I deal with all the incoming donations we get. People are allowed to donate anything pretty much, so I've seen some wack stuff.
But last month I came in and someone had donated thousands of new movies in their Redbox cases in plain cardboard boxes. I have no idea if the person who donated them was a Redbox employee, or someone who just raided a dying Redbox, or if this was someone's guilty collection acquired over the last decade. The weird thing is, the closest Redbox to the library (literally just down the road) is still there and pretty much operational (haven't tried it in the last few weeks tho, so idk..) so these discs were probably not from there.
I just ended up setting them out for our annual DVD/CD sale last week. A handful of them got bought up, so now they're just randomly floating around my town.

[shanes.]

RIP redbox. used to rent Wii games at $2 and rip them to a hard drive. play them on my modded wii. kicked ass

[kittyanya]

Guy came into my store asking if we had a Redbox so he could return his. The double take I got when I yelled back they were bankrupt as he walked away was priceless. "What do I do!?" "Guess it's yours now!"

[Truth_Spoken]

I was a repair tech (FSR 2) for Redbox from 2013-2017.

The blue machines were a Walmart thing (It’s their color) for a short time.

In 2017 we had to upgrade all of them to Windows 10, once Microsoft dropped support for Windows 7.

Game theft was a huge problem. The machines used a low resolution camera to scan the barcodes on the discs, so as long as it could read the barcode it thought it was a good return. People would photo copy and print replacements or just move the stickers to some other junk disc to return them. They didn’t have a way to track who rented them because barcodes were only unique to the disc titles, not the actual discs themselves.
I’m actually surprised they lasted as long as they did.

[evanlee]

I'm glad people are taking the initiative to preserve these. Such a shame redbox went out of business but it was only a matter of time

[ShaferScott]

Redbox went into liquidation bankruptcy. It’s parent company sells off the assets. Those stands still make money so they are sold off to whoever buys them and could potentially stay open if whoever buys them decides to keep operating them.

[Missquerade]

This is crazy, the end of an era I'm going to miss these machines because you would randomly see movies you never planned on seeing. Kind of like the old Blockbuster experience

[mazda]

Redbox kiosks were kind of like the last remnant of the old days of video rentals. They kinda felt like the last little glimmer of the Blockbuster experience existing until the 2020s.

[etekweb]

My theory: these machines have some kind of "offline mode" programmed in, where if the machine is not able to access the Internet, it will assume the card is good and dispense the movie, then store a ledger of card numbers and amounts due on an database inside the machine itself to resolve later once the device is re-connected to the Internet (or synchronized in some other way). This would explain why your card was not charged.

Scholastic Book Fairs use a similar system - the machine is often not connected to any Internet or phone line, someone at Scholastic just runs all the cards from the machine once it's shipped back. I suspect they are not the only ones that take this approach.

[SuPeRNinJaRed]

5:38 The last time anyone would get the chance to play Redbox Roulette and your rando pick was Beauty and the Beast LOL Honestly that seems so perfect somehow...

[uhoh]

Man this is way sadder than I thought it would be. My childhood was going up to our cabin every few weeks or so and every single time without fail my Dad and I would stop at a Redbox and pick out 3 movies to watch over the weekend together. It was always such a quick way to find new movies and I’m sad to see that era die.

[breakinggames]

My theory on why some machines still work is possibly the payment processing service its using is still active but the bank account it uses is gone, frozen or etc so the machine will most likely think its gone through when in reality it never did

[studlyhungwell]

That’s the Wall-E of redboxes. A relentless little worker.

[greggv]

One of the first special Redbox Rental DVDs was "Up!". It had the menu removed and no subtitles, not even closed captions. It also had a bunch of ads for other Disney stuff, which could not be fast forwarded or skipped. At the end of the movie it would automatically restart the ads so it would play them and the movie in an infinite loop.
But the chapter markers were left in so if you wanted to rewatch it without seeing all the ads you could go to chapter 1 before it hit the end of the credits and returned to the start of the loop.

Disney figured out a way to make a DVD worse than a tape. When I found it had no subtitles or closed captions, I figured parents of deaf children would be really pissed off, a quick google showed that yes, they were. If there wasn't a theater showing with subtitles, the only way their deaf kid could enjoy the movie was to buy a full retail copy.

[ScottHilt]

All retailers with RedBox units were asked to unplug the machines and place an out of order sign on them. As it turns out, very few followed the request.