I was thinking back to those days when I used to visit the movie rental stores. Now I have to say that was long enough ago that it was VHS at the time. I haven’t graced a store with my presence since the DVD was new. I’ve actually been a subscriber to Netflix for almost 10 years now. In the very early days of DVD’s becoming prevalent I had DVD players all over the place!

For those that know me, calling me an early adopter doesn’t quite do it justice. I’m always looking for what will be the next thing and trying to get there early on. I have stood in the line for 3 generations of iPhones, I have pre-ordered the latest OS’s, I have built complex DVR networks throughout my house, I had ISDN for 5 years before broadband made it to my house and I watched them lay the cable and called every day to be the first one with Roadrunner! So when Netflix came out, I was right on board with it. But why?

The main reason was that I wasn’t at the mercy of the video store for what I could rent and when. I could actually login to the Netflix site and find what movies that I might be interested in and reserve them in my queue. And then they just showed up! It was great and it put the power back into my hands. Not only that, it took away late fees! I wasn’t required to return a movie at a certain time, I could keep it as long as I wanted if I kept my subscription paid.

The same thing is true of the DVD rental kiosks from Blockbuster Express and Redbox. Now the consumer is in the driver’s seat again. You can stop by a kiosk on your way through somewhere you typically go (drugstore, convenience store, grocery) and pick up movies that way. But the real power is in the fact that you can go online, find the kiosk that has the movie you are looking for and reserve it. With Redbox you simply show up at the kiosk and swipe the same card you have on file and it then ejects all of your movies for you ready to go. It is simple, convenient, and you are in control of the process. And there are no late fees, you just get charged a daily fee. If you keep it for longer, you know what the fees are for doing so.

And I think that Netflix paved the way in changing how consumers rent movies. By giving us that control over what we could get we have become accustomed to it. Now the kiosks add one more twist to that by giving it to us RIGHT NOW versus waiting for the mail.

It is a great study into the psyche of the consumer to see what we are looking for and the kiosk vendors have done a great job of it. I hope that with blogs such as this that we can keep the companies up with consumer desires and that we can continue forward into better and better products.