Sources: Redbox planning to launch a new digital video-on-demand store called Redbox Digital
but this time do it alone, and focus on VOD instead subscriptions http://variety.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands eight months after President Mark Horak stepped down as Redbox's core DVD-kiosk business kept shrinking — the leadership change was the signal, this is the strategy. The description's key detail is 'do it alone': Redbox plans to run Redbox Digital as a standalone storefront built around per-title video-on-demand, deliberately skipping the subscription model.
The arc resolves over the following year: by July Redbox had confirmed it was testing Redbox Digital, and by December 2017 the effort shipped as Redbox On Demand with 6,000+ titles renting from $3.99 for 48 hours — so this March 2016 sourcing is the first concrete look at the pivot taking shape.
First-order effects
- Redbox would put its kiosk-brand rental economics — cheap, per-title, no commitment — into streaming, competing head-on with established transactional VOD stores rather than subscription services like Netflix.
- Going solo means Redbox bears the full cost of building and marketing the store itself, with no partner sharing the risk or the customer relationship.
Second-order effects
- Choosing VOD over subscriptions keeps Redbox out of a collision with its own kiosk business — a subscription could cannibalize $1-2 disc rentals, while per-title digital rentals extend them — but also leaves it exposed when aggregators like Roku push the opposite way toward subscription marketplaces.
- Studios gain an additional transactional outlet for catalog titles, one whose pricing ($3.99-tier rentals) anchors digital closer to disc economics than subscription bundles allow.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, physical-media rental brands survive by migrating their per-title pricing into digital storefronts rather than chasing the subscription bundle everyone else is building — a structural split between transactional holdouts and subscription aggregators.
The trend: Disc-rental businesses are extending their per-title rental model into transactional VOD as physical media declines, carving a lane alongside — not against — the subscription-streaming consolidation.