Hands On With Redbox Instant

adeelarshad82 writes "The three things any streaming service needs in order to be successful are: a good price, a massive content library, and a decent app that is available on as many devices as possible. Unfortunately the only thing Redbox Instant has going for it right now is the price. The digital library that comprises Redbox Instant at the moment is limited to a handful of comedies, budget horror flicks, and one or two blockbuster titles from the last year. However, there is hope that once the final version is launched, Verizon FiOS On Demand's massive libraries of current television shows will be made available on Redbox. As for the app itself: while it's well designed and offers filtering by search, genre and rating, its biggest drawback is that it's only available on iOS and Android devices. You can't even stream from the Redbox website."

Re:When will the MPAA learn?

[hawguy]

Full 1080p (or 4320p-3D in the near future.) drm free videos for just 0.99c will stop 99.9% of piracy. Also Blockbuster just gone into administration in the UK [guardian.co.uk]

For just under one penny, you can't even afford the bandwidth to distribute the content. That being said, yes I suspect that .99 cent downloads would stop piracy.

I think he was using Verizon Math [blogspot.com] and really meant $.99 or 99 cents.

Re:When will the MPAA learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha! Good one!

Seems to me that in the late 90's/early 00's we heard 'If the RIAA would just sell us one song for $0.99, instead of making us buy a whole album, it would eliminate 99% of piracy.' Then iTunes came along and sold songs for $0.99, and the pirates said "but it has DRM! If they would just eliminate the DRM it would stop 99% of piracy!' Then iTunes and other services removed the DRM, and now of course music piracy has been wiped out, right?

Pirates are going to pirate no matter what. The stupid excuses they offer up as to why they do it (or what it would take to eliminate it) are nothing but rationalizations to themselves.

Re:Blockbuster titles from last year

[CastrTroy]

Especially since the cost of NetFlix is about $8 a month. That's about the cost of 2 movie rentals. Cable on demand movies and other online movie services that do offer blockbuster new releases cost about $5 jut to rent the movie for 24-48 hours. So even if Netflix doesn't have the newest blockbusters, they have quite a good deal for those people who don't have to watch a specific movie. I watch a lot of TV seasons on there. My only complaint is that if you're browsing on the Wii, it's almost impossible to see all the movies they have unless you search for them by name. There's actually quite a bit of content on there, but they make it really hard to find.