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Or often worse than $3.99 on new releases. Alita: Battle Angel is $5.99 to rent in HD right now on Amazon. Redbox is charging $2.12 for all Blu-ray releases o
by adventured 7y ago
Or often worse than $3.99 on new releases.
Alita: Battle Angel is $5.99 to rent in HD right now on Amazon.
Redbox is charging $2.12 for all Blu-ray releases on disc, including Alita. Their streaming version is also $5.99 in HD.
Hard to imagine running those kiosks 24/7, maintaining them and stocking them is cheaper than serving up a stream version. They're no doubt charging $5.99 because they're confident that they can command it based on convenience (laziness factor). $3-$3.50 for a new release in HD is around the edge of reasonable in my opinion; and $1 to $2 for everything else.
- lallysingh 7y agoDon't the kiosks charge late fees? Isn't that where the money was in the rental business?
- adventured 7y agoI'd have to assume they make a nice kicker from it. They add an identical rental fee each day. So if you roll it over past the return time, they re-rent it to you basically. I know someone that owned a rental chain (the old style physical stores) in the 1980s and early 1990s. At any given time 15-20% of their sales came from late fees. Also interesting is that VHS tapes once cost $70-$100 ($40-$60 wholesale; $55 in 1984 is $140 today), so there was a serious investment and risk in renting them out to customers at the time. Stores typically purchased the tapes outright from the studios back then (so you can imagine the VHS tape inventory costs); more recently many independent stores switched to a shared revenue model, where they didn't have to front cash for inventory.
- Mathnerd314 7y agoPart of the kiosks being cheaper is copyright; Redbox can buy retail discs if they have to, so they have a lot more leverage in licensing.