Movie rentals aren’t happening the way they used to.

People used to go to the video store and browse through the aisles of various movie titles in different categories. You would spend some time over on the New Release walls and then maybe come back into the aisles separated into different Genre’s once you gave up on finding a copy of that new release you were looking for. But it seems that the days of the big video rental store are going away. The two big players, Hollywood Video and Blockbuster, worked out deals to get massive quantities of the new release movies so that you could always come to a store and find one available. But the expense of having to keep that many copies around starts eating into either the profit of the store or the profit of the studio.

So along comes Netflix. Personally I have been a subscriber for almost 9 years now! During that time I have graced the halls of the brick and mortar video store twice…both to redeem a gift card someone gave my children. But even the subscription model for videos has been getting to be a bit of a problem. One thing that I have noticed is that I need to return movies on particular days to get the new releases. I need to send them back so that I get movies shipped to me either on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. If I don’t, then those new releases go into Long Wait status and I never seem to get them.


So the next evolution to come about is the DVD rental kiosks. I now use the subscription service to get my TV shows and older movies that I want to see but I don’t worry about the new releases. Sure, I put them in the queue, but if they don’t get to me on the first couple of tries, I just stop by one of the MANY convenient kiosks that I drive past every day and pick one up. And with kiosk providers like Redbox now providing real-time inventory or reservations, I can just pull out my iPhone while headed somewhere and locate which kiosk to stop at. Or when I’m in the grocery store I always would take some time to check out the MovieCube from The New Release and see if they had one of the movies on my list.

With Redbox having over 12,000 kiosks out and MovieCube having 2,500 there are plenty of locations to choose from. I’m really looking forward to NCR rolling out the Blockbuster Express kiosks. That is what this blog is all about is keeping up with this industry and where Blockbuster Express is going. I really believe that we have seen a fundamental shift in how DVD rentals are done. And pretty soon, we will see how Video Game purchases and rentals will change as well!