RIP Redbox

July marked an unfortunate milestone in the entertainment industry: Redbox, the company behind the ubiquitous DVD vending machine shut down for good. Originally founded in 2002 an initiative from the fast food chain McDonalds, the company operated tens of thousands of bright red machines that dispensed Blu Rays, DVDs, and games to customers. They were simple to operate: insert your credit card, select the item you wanted to rent, and it would spit out the disk in a small plastic sleeve, which you could return at any of the company's kiosks.

The company has been in trouble for a little while: it was sold to a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, in 2017, launched a streaming service, tried its hand at acquiring original content, and was purchased in 2022 by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, after which point a whole bunch of chains like 7-Eleven, CVS sued the company for not paying them for their locations (they received a percentage of the rentals). In 2024, the company announced some massive losses and went into bankruptcy and liquidation, which included its chain of Redbox kiosks. Janko Roettgers has a pretty good overview of how and why the company collapsed.

There are a couple of ways to look at this story; first as a case study of business mismanagement, in which the Redbox was acquired and passed from company to company. Chicken Soup seems to have overextended itself when it acquired the company, and once the companies that hosted it began unplugging the machines after missed payments, everything seems to have snowballed. As Roettgers reports, the pandemic didn't help: the loss of new releases put several nails in the company's coffin.

The other way to look at this is a much larger story of how we consume entertainment: streaming services have overtaken the home video market, with streamers like Apple TV+, Disney+, Max, Netflix, Peacock, and others shifting consumer preferences away from physical discs to options that you can select from the comfort of your home.

These sorts of upheavals are a familiar story in the entertainment industry: prior to the 1980s, movie theaters were primarily where you'd go to take in a film. Television cut into that a bit, but it was with the development of the VHS tape that opened up an entirely new market that studios resisted for years, worrying (correctly) that it would cut into their theatrical revenue. With the introduction of the DVD (and later, Blu-Ray), the market for VHS declined and vanished: the last ones were produced in 2016. The discs are experiencing a similar decline, as companies have begun pulling back on manufacturing and releasing home releases, and as stores like Best Buy and Walmart have begun cutting back or eliminating their offerings entirely.

Redbox is part of that story. It entered the picture because while rental outlets like Blockbuster offered up a huge selection of films for rent, a kiosk could easily sit outside of any number of high-traffic locations, like supermarkets or drug stores. DVDs were also easier to distribute, and by focusing on new releases, one could easily rent a handful of films while out running errands, and easily drop them off when they encountered one of the locations.

The company did run into considerable issues along the way: they ran afoul of various studios worried about how Redbox's rentals impacted their own sales, often imposing retail windows (Redbox apparently would purchase films from other retailers!) or working out some sort of distribution deals with them.

Looking back, Redbox appears to be one of those companies that was destined to fail, given the gains in streaming and the decline of physical media. It's so much easier to subscribe to Netflix and have a much wider selection available at your fingertips.

But where Netflix correctly envisioned a future where streaming would take over, Redbox was not only late to the game with their own attempts, but they also had a large footprint of physical locations and the supporting infrastructure to contend with, something that's hard to shift around quickly. It seems like it's a case where the company just wasn't able to adapt to the changing landscape quickly enough.

The result is now these empty husks that are sitting abandoned at shopping centers and strip malls across the country. The one at my local grocery store sadly sits just outside of the checkout lines, with a taped-on sign that reads "Redbox is no longer in business."

It's an unfortunate turn, one that I'm slightly complicit in; I can't remember the last film I rented from a Redbox. I've rented my share over them over the years, but I've often preferred to buy my own DVDs rather than rent them, while the collection of streaming services I subscribe to has taken over the "let me check this film out rather than invest in buying it" tendencies that I have.

The danger here is that Hollywood's pivot to streaming means there are fewer outlets to find home releases: as stores pull back their selections (if they have them at all) and rental outlets like Redbox vanish into the sunset, it seems that demand for physical copies is destined to decline as well. I don't think that it'll vanish entirely – look at the resurgence of vinyl, the durability of physical printed books, and the continued availability of CDs.

But maybe it'll be harder to get films and shows in non-streaming ways. Disney only released The Mandalorian and Andor a couple of years after the shows debuted on Disney+, while Amazon only released a boxed set of the entire Expanse series back in December. As we've seen with streaming services, what's available online can be unreliable, especially as these platforms have pulled down some of their original offerings when they didn't perform as well as they'd like. Having the discs on hand is a bulwark against those stories vanishing, and while the end of a company like Redbox isn't the whole story, it's just one piece of the larger picture.

Who knows? With Redbox's assets being liquidated, maybe some ambitious person will figure out a way to use those machines to restart a similar business, tapping into the convenience that they once afforded. One can hope.