At this point this is probably better suited to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I am one who still receives Netflix discs in the mail. The selection is vastly superior to Netflix streaming (or any other streaming service I’ve known).
However, you do usually have to wait a while for new releases; if there is a newer film I really want to see, I’ll hop over to Redbox and cough up a buck.
Also not mentioned: you can check online for availability of a movie at a specific Redbox site.
mmm
I use Redbox because I’m more likely to find the specific movie I’m looking for there than on any of the streaming services. Every single time I think of a film I want to see, I visit canistream.it and check, and neither NetFlix or Amazon have it. And while they might have it as a “Digital Rental” the price is obscene, specially as the cost of delivering a digital file to a Roku is tiny, they are wanting five or six dollars. Screw that nonsense! When a digital rental costs less than Redbox supplying a physical location and a physical disc, then maybe I’ll consider it.
But streaming from a paid service is much less accessible than physical media. You need an Internet connection to watch the film, and you need a subscription to the service. Once your subscription lapses, the film is no longer accessible to you. In fact, you risk losing access to the film even when you keep your subscription, since streaming services routinely drop titles from their catalogues. You also can’t easily do most of the things with streamed videos that you can do with physical media: you can’t buy them anonymously with cash, you can’t lend them to your friends, you can’t make copies for the purpose of time- and format-shifting, and you can’t sell them or give them away when you no longer need them.
Redbox exists so that people with shitty taste can go out and rent one of the 50 movies Eric Roberts makes every year.
(keep scrolling. 50 might be an understatement)
Holy shit.
You aren’t kidding. What’s up with that? How is it profitable for the studios to make all these B-movies? Do they play to foreign audiences or something? Is Eric Roberts a huge star in Armenia or Estonia?
I recently rented both the movies ‘blade runner 2049’ and ‘American made’. I had a coupon that redbox sent me to get half off my order, so I got both DVDs for $1.61 total.
I just checked amazon prime, streaming those movies would cost me $6 each, so $12 total.
So that is why. I’d rather pay $1.61 to get the physical DVDs than spend $12 to stream the movies. Yeah, redbox is an inconvenience but its not a huge hassle as there are several near where I live.
- I don’t watch movies on my cellphone or my 8 inch tablet. I watch them on my large 1080p screen, and I am not impressed with the mediocre quality Amazon downloads I’ve seen so far.
I don’t think that this is an accurate summation of the effects of the Canadian law. I am unaware of any law in either Canada or the US that legally allows people to make copies of media that they have not purchased rights to.
There’s no need to go by my summation; I linked to the exact text of the law. The section covering private copying is the first two sentences in the linked page. It does not require the person making the copy to have purchased the rights to do so in advance—the whole point of the amendment was to eliminate this requirement in the case of private use.
So DVDs can Go Their Own Way.
Have you ever looked at the dvds in a Redbox? I looked at one and didn’t recognize 95% of the titles. Or most of the crap that pads the catalogues of Amazon and Netflix. I assume foreign distribution is big as well, but there seems to be a large appetite for shitty, low-budget flicks out there.
I have no idea how to get or use an Amazon, a firestick, a hulu, or a netflix. I have DVD player which my husband knows how to use. The movies for the last 10 years have been utter crap, I don’t think we get more than half a dozen out of Redbox a year. Otherwise, I rent DVDs from the library, or buy them on Amazon. I mostly watch TCM on tv and deeply regret getting rid of my VCR because I recorded hundreds of movies on tapes . Threw them out, like a fool.
If anyone would come over here and tutor us in the ways of hulu and netflix and stuff, please do, we will make it worth your time.
WHat kind of hardware do you have to start with?
There are smart TV’s that make netflix fool proof, just hit a menu button and pick the netflix or hulu etc app
There are also blueray players that connect to your wifi and have netflix hul etc apps built in
There are devices like a roku, which are just the streaming apps minus the dvd player
All basically work by hitting menu and picking the app
then just browsing the titles selection and picking one.
And of course if you have a laptop, or a PC near the TV, most modern PCs can connect direct to a TV via HDMI and you would use the netflix hulu etc desktop app
or web browser
We have Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu and watch TV/movies on all of them. But we mainly use Redbox when we’re on long road trips. We can rent a movie for the kids, then a couple of hours later stop at another Walgreens and return it and rent a new one for the next leg of the trip. It’s easier then downloading one and trying to watch it on a phone or laptop.
That’s a clever use of Redbox, made possible by the fact that they don’t care which kiosk you return the movies to.
I have access to several systems like this and they all have a massive failure rate. Just won’t connect, the app crashes for that TV, or it just doesn’t like the way my connection looks. I invariably end up connecting through some other device than the ‘native’ app.
I finally got a good enough connection so I can stream. Gotta go over satellite so it’s hardly what most people would call fast.
I did sign up for Netflix for the novelty of it if nothing else. I’ve watched some stuff, but not much. My Wife and I have a pretty good DVD collection, and will often just pop in one of those. We have no problem re-watching a movie we have enjoyed.
Never used Red-Box, but I guess I can see the appeal. Isn’t the selection VERY limited. I mean how many different DVD’s does a Red Box usually have?
I think the Redbox kiosks have maybe 100-200 discs in them, and these tend to be the newest major releases. There’s very little in the way of a long tail, unlike the Netflix DVD-by-mail service. And I think they have some video games as well. The nice thing is the website can tell you where a particular title is, so if it’s not in the closest kiosk, it might be in another nearby. And you can reserve a disc, at least for a short while.
I just picked up Dunkirk on Blu-Ray for about $2 while I was at the grocery store Saturday. Renting it from Amazon would have cost $6 and the streaming quality would have been worse. Redbox offered me a free video game rental, which would have been a nice bonus if I’d had the interest. I returned the movie when I walked my dog yesterday. I didn’t even have to go in the store. Why do you want me to pay $4 more for a worse product?