I have long wondered if Blockbuster will bring Blockbuster Express Kiosks into their stores. I actually created this draft for a story July 3rd of 2009 but didn’t really have any content. But with the rollout this week of the SD downloadable kiosks, Blockbuster Express in a Blockbuster store is exactly what seems to be happening.

As Blockbuster closes stores rapidly, they are actually turning their efforts back to their kiosks to keep the company alive. Primarily the DVD kiosks are finding themselves in places where people frequent on a regular basis other than a video rental store; grocery stores, convenience stores, dollar stores (which are seeing a huge climb this year due to the economic situation), and even fast food restaurants. People have to make a specific trip to go to a Blockbuster location both for rental and return. It is very common for there to be a Blockbuster Express kiosk in a store within the same complex where a brick-and-mortar store is. It seems like 30% of all the Publix stores out there where kiosks are have a Blockbuster in the same parking lot!

But if you are like me, if I did walk into a Blockbuster store I’d just as soon deal with a kiosk there than deal with the people working there. But from a company perspective, there is no reason to use a kiosk inside a brick-and-mortar store. You have significant expenses in that brick-and-mortar store. But that all just changed.

Now we have the pilot program of the downloadable content kiosks. Because these require a little more than you can do at a simple kiosk, namely checkout of a hardware device, they are being placed in the Blockbuster locations. Right now, when you download content, it cannot be played back with many devices (as far as anyone knows, only one device at the moment). So the stores are providing a device that goes along with your downloadable content that you can hook up to your TV and watch. We can presume that there will be some way to move the content later so that it can be played on the devices that people actually have. For myself, that would be an iPhone, AppleTV, or the Roku player.

So I wonder if DVD rental will also be something you can do at the kiosk and how that will affect the store sales. Leave me your thoughts and comments.