this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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The issue here isn't with the core idea Redbox is going for, the problem is rights holders not allowing interesting uses of their media.
I'd really like to see something like Redbox pivot into something with a much bigger catalogue and much lower operating costs. The kiosks could provide USB/HDMI dongles where pretty much any media can be loaded and displayed on a TV for a consistent price. That way they could offer a much larger catalog, don't need to have someone physically move disks around, and the kiosks can be smaller since they don't need a bank of DVDs and Blurays. They could have a digital distribution platform to complement it, where you can stream everything instead of going to a kiosk. And you don't need any special equipment, pretty much everything has a USB or HDMI dongle.
Just think of going to a drive-thru and getting a dongle with your meal so you can watch a show with your fast food dinner. The only real logistics here is rebalancing the supply of these dongles, but that's much simpler than restocking DVDs/Blurays. These dongles can also be incredibly cheap, probably something like $1-2 at scale, and they could be reused dozens if not hundreds of times. They could even partner with libraries to digitize their library so patrons don't need to have a DVD/Bluray player to watch stuff.
But no, we can't have nice things. I'm pushing back by cancelling my streaming services and going back to ripping DVDs/Blurays. I have nearly finished digitizing my collection of disks, and I'm going to be buying and ripping physical media going forward. Screw this slow march toward "you will own nothing and be happy" nonsense.
Allowing people to take rewritable media home and return it sounds like it would open the door for malware.
It's possible, but with copy protections, it's incredibly unlikely. You'd run an app on your computer or TV to decrypt and view the media, just like you do with Netflix or whatever.
that wouldn't stop someone from dropping a "media player" on the drive with your logo on it that's actually malware. People unfamiliar with how it's supposed to work would plug that in and run it without even thinking about it. I guess you could have the machine format the drive every time it comes back and have it test for counterfeits to prevent that though now that I think about it more.
Yup, that's the plan. You turn it in, it reimages it to whatever the next customer is likely to need, and if a customer asks for something out of left-field, it would reflash and take a bit longer.
Flashing on return is essential because it checks whether the returned item is still in working order, so it really wouldn't be an issue.
The USB port of the machine is also an attack vector.
Eh, I suppose, but they could design the USB drive really hard to infect. The more narrow your use-case, the more options you have to secure it.
They could even limit it to just HDMI, which would probably be a lot harder to attack since HDMI doesn't support much besides audio and video.