Another victim of technology moving on from physical media to streaming as its parent company, Chicken Soup For the Soul (!) is entering Chapter 7 liquidation.
It’s too bad; I’m sure there are still plenty of people who don’t have cable or sufficient internet bandwidth to stream a movie.
I saw the ones around here closed up a while ago.
I haven’t seen a Redbox kiosk in years, although to be fair I rarely go to McDonalds or convenience stores or similar locations where they were usually planted. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I even watched a DVD. It’s been many years, for sure.
I hadn’t really thought of this; I suppose there probably are a non-insignificant number of people for who Redbox still provides the only available movie entertainment choices.
I watched one last week. It came from my library which has a huge and current collection.
OTOH in the course of that i discovered my library subscribes to something called Kanopy that I’d never heard of.
About 1 jillion free streaming DVDs to anyone w a library card from a participating library.
That may have been my last DVD too.
I just got a library card for different reasons. They have a huge couple of shelves full of DVDs. For free
We have one at the grocery store I work at. As of today it’s still open for business, but I’m sure that’ll change soon.
There was a period of about a year, years ago, when I’d get DVDs from Redbox.
There’s another library movie/television streaming service called Hoopla that your library may offer.
There are gazillion DVDs around. Cheap as dirt at thrift, flea markets and garage sales. Even dollar stores. And yes the Library.
If all you have is a TV, DVD player, no service of any kind. You can watch a movie.
Heck, we still have VCR tapes the kids watch.
(Yep, the clock is still blinking on the VCR player)
Yeah, my friend bought me two DVDs two Christmases ago, and I haven’t watched them, as I don’t even have anything in the house that plays DVDs. It must be at least ten years for me, probably closer to fifteen, at my then-girlfriend/now wife’s place.
My Blu-ray player is in the closet in the office. Presumably it still works.
I just looked and we still have a DVD/BluRay player next to the Xbox One on a shelf under the TV. Neither is hooked up but the Xbox can play DVD’s and BluRays.
Thinking about this, I remember watching Crossroads and the original James Stewart Flight of the Phoenix on DVD sometime between the summer of 2020 and the early fall of 2021. I can narrow it down only that far because I know what house we were living in when I watched them. At the time I couldn’t find them on streaming anywhere so bought used copies on Ebay. I’m pretty sure one of those was the last DVD I watched.
Thanks. I’d known of Hoopla for e-books; my library uses them too. I had not known they do vids. Although it makes sense from a technological POV.
They have most movies, will get you the movies you can’t find from other libraries, and also stream movies freely on Hoopla and Kanopy.
I’ll actually miss them, but they’ve been functionally dead for over a year. I used to get a free rental about every other month from T-Mobile Tuesdays perk, but first, Disney took all of their movies out of any promos, then Sony, so the “new releases” became less valuable.
Then they made about 50-70% of the rest of the library part of their Redbox + system, where you had to pay a membership to be able to rent them, which left the box nearly valueless to me.
The last 4 or so “free” rentals went to waste for the above reasons, plus for the last 6 months, the boxes near me had been un-serviced, their customer service line wasn’t manned, and that’s for the boxes that weren’t flat closed.
Not that that streaming wasn’t eating their lunch, but the major distributers cutting them out to amplify their own streaming exclusives certainly accelerated the collapse.
The box at our supermarket was removed a few weeks ago. We used them while traveling on vacation. We would find a Red Box early on the trip and the kids would watch a movie on a portable DVD player, and then we’d drop it off at another Red Box at our destination, or somewhere inbetween.
I was never a Redbox customer but I thought of this thread this morning when I drove past one of their machines connected to a CVS that itself closed within the last couple weeks. The signs are down and things painted over.