Redbox was a service for renting DVDs from automated kiosks. The business was going well until it wasn’t anymore, and then the company went bankrupt in July this year. And yet… the machines live on. At least, that’s according to YouTuber [Smokin’ Silicon], who spotted some remaining Redbox kiosks out and about. Including at his local Walmart!
Here’s the thing. There’s not one big switch at Redbox that turns all the machines off, and even if there was—nobody hit it the moment the company declared bankruptcy. Thus, when [Smokin’ Silicon] rocked up to Walmart, he was able to flick through the movies and even add one to cart for purchase. However, trying to complete the transaction failed—the kiosk eventually reported itself as out of service. That makes sense—you’d expect payment processing to be the first thing to go down.
However, other Redbox kiosks were different. A kiosk at a Food Lion location actually still worked—and [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to complete the transaction and walk away with a Black Adam disc! On a second trip, he was able to walk away with even more!
The rest of the video dives into Redbox lore and other posts online about the status of the company, software, and hardware. Apparently, someone on Reddit was claiming they had the Redbox kiosk OS available. Meanwhile, some users have had trouble returning their discs because the company is now defunct. However, [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to return his without issue. Ultimately, though, he recommends his viewers to go out and score as many DVDs and Blu Rays as possible from the machines since soon enough, they’ll be gone forever.
The fact is, businesses are big and Kafkaesque, the kiosks are scattered all over the country, and so it’s anybody’s guess if and when they stop working. Back when this website began, a redbox was something different entirely. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Hari Wiguna for the tip!]
So the redbox company has gone bankrupt. Does that mean that eventually all the current assets will be sold at cents on the dollar to partially pay off their current debts as fast as possible. And if that is the case then “Smokin’ Silicon” may have told a large number of people to commit theft, is that a crime ? And more importantly could the partially paid debtors pursue Smokin’ Silicon’s assets ?
Just watched the video, he said “do with this what you will”, which is from a legal standpoint is probably safe.
It is likely there is not enough value in those discs. And I think stores want those things gone, presumably their agreements would have expired by now or soon will expire. After some grace period they would have to dispose of the machines and their contents anyway.
There’s all sorts of case law around organizations accidentally giving something away.
If the government accidentally advertises, and pays out, unauthorized signing bonuses for new California National Guard recruits, (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/us/pentagon-halts-efforts-to-claw-back-california-national-guard-bonuses.html) then they’ll garnish wages to get them back, unless a literal act of congress allows the recruits to keep their promised income.
If a bank adds money to your account because you committed check fraud (https://gizmodo.com/idiots-who-tried-tiktoks-viral-free-money-glitch-at-atms-are-getting-reported-for-fraud-2000495838) they’ll deduct the ill gotten gains, and can prosecute you for fraud.
The Redbox Kiosks that are dispensing disks are still informing the customer that they are being charged for the purchase of the disk, (including the rental disks, which are really rent-to-own) so it would be very difficult to show fraud, and unless it was on a very large scale, it would cost far more to investigate than it would bring in.
Also, Redbox likely stopped paying rent for their locations long before starting bankruptcy proceedings, so the property owners may have the right to dispose of or sell the kiosks, depending on what’s on the contract.
You have no idea how bankruptcy works. Bills still get paid. And 99% of those Redbox locations, are operated by contractors or 3rd party vendors, not Redbox.
More importantly, who cares? Did you never press all the buttons on the soda machines to try and get a free soda?
Sure. But the pop machine doesn’t have my name, address, and credit card information.
I wish the hardware could be repurposed to provide a digital library service instead of just scrapped… there remain many areas of the world without access to high-speed internet. There’s a logistics problem, but it seems a shame to mark everything off as waste.
We have a Discord set up for collecting and reverse engineering the kiosks for anyone interested… :)
https://discord.gg/ZKMNTNYKs8
great. discord is the best!
/s
rip irc
IRC is till a thing. We’re here 24/7/365.
Physical media is still popular, I’m sure some people wouldn’t mind a hacked Redbox in their home to store their media for the hell of it.
That would be a very interesting repurpose case. Maybe in a public library. Scan your library card, the system verifies your membership in good standing and dispenses the media. When you return the media it calculates any late fees and charges your account. No librarian needed for the transaction and the media would take up less shelf space.
I’m certain it could. Around when RedBox started and was popular, the library system near me had a few kiosks that were eerily similar to the Redbox machines, and you could check out items with your library card
I’d rather walk away with the kiosk… probably some nifty parts in there.
If you make a call to a store manager and tell him you want to make an appointment to pick up that redbox kiosk, they’ll probably be more than happy to let you take it. It’s probably not legal but the chances of you being proscecuted if you don’t blog too openly about it seem very slim to me.
ive called walgreens, walmart, foodlion and cvs and all of them telle they cant just give one away, i have general lability insurance and the equipment to pick up the machine and i want one so i keep calling different locations
“if you don’t blog too openly about it”
Oops! And that is where I failed in my comment (below)!
B^)
Yeah, there’s an unplugged one about a mile away from my location. I should ask the store’s manager if he’d like to have it removed.
In the Netherlands we used to have a fast bus network from 1994 to the early 2000’s, which had distinctive bus stops: Green in colour, with a synchronized digital clock, a phone and (not visible) a base station for a precursor of the cellular phone network (Greenpoint/Greenhopper). The bus stops themselves seem to belong to noone and are still standing about, rusting away, sometimes their clocks still on but wildly off the current time.
I love when you see leftovers of the past that noone cares about enough.
Probably KPN not wanting to tear them down and putting it on the municipality, and the municipality shoving it back to KPN :’)
Where was this? I’m Dutch too and never heard of this. I found a company called Greenhopper and it’s a cab service. The only Greenpoint I know off in the Netherlands is a failing gas station brand.
I’m talking about the Interliner bus service (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interliner). The phone network was Greenpoint (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpoint_(telefoonnetwerk) ) which worked with base stations at train stations, postoffices, phonebooth, Shell gas stations, Interliner bus stops and many other locations. It was a Cordless Telephone type 2 (CT2)-system, based on the ETSI-standaad I-ETS 300 131. This basically meant that you could call and get called within 100m of the base stations, and the phone at home sat at a private base station that connected to your landline. More expensive phones had a builtin semaphone so people could reach you with a number code throughout the country, after which you could drive to a base station and call.
Bus stops that I know still exist are Heereveen Oost (https://maps.app.goo.gl/tYyp1HSDatogdBRy5), Zurich Kop Afsluitdijk (https://maps.app.goo.gl/rPgPMinCSLuqn9az9)
According to the company history, the Greenpoint network stopped in 1999
That was the Greenpoint / Kermit network, a precursor to the modern cellular network. Also you’d see Greenpoints on trainstations and other public spaces.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpoint_(telefoonnetwerk)
It all depends. Redbox had maintainers/operators go out and change discs/rental options on those Kiosks. Similar to vending machines and arcades. I’ve seen Redbox kiosks that were totally powered down and others still on but with errors on the screens. Wouldn’t surprise me the maintainers/operators were to power those down and turn in keys. However a lot of them just gave up since they were not getting paid. As for some units working like the example in the story I bet Redbox has so many Kiosks that most of the cellular communicators are still active. It’s not like a family plan of cell phones to keep track of. Probably a couple dozen to a hundred on a account and another batch on another account. Probably works the same way as Alarm systems. The company just pays a large sum for the year.
It’s too soon for the Kiosks and I know a lot of companies, owners, managers want them gone off of their properties but they will probably sit there for a year or two then you’ll see them gone. Either by people like us for parts getting them or some company like Walmart selling them in bulk for scrap.
38,000 kiosk in total. Walgreens locations have the kiosks hardwired directly to the building’s main power supply. As to why those still powered. Because they can’t turn them off…
“Hardwired directly to the building’s main power supply”. As in: there is no breaker? That is either a serious code violation or (more probably) not true.
The “red box” link is quite the long distance callback. :)
I also liked it
A little under a decade ago, I would still sometimes Redbox a movie if it wasn’t on Netflix, especially when travelling for work. Then, one time, I try to return a movie to the kiosk I got it from (planning, at the time, to get another) after a 12-hour day, only to find its return functionality out of order. This was a smaller low-density Midwestern city, so I had to drive 20 minutes there and back to the next nearest Redbox to return the movie in time. The last thing I wanted to do was burn 40 minutes, so that was the very last movie I ever rented from them.
Like TiVo, a service/product of its time, and not one I’m sad to see go.
really wanna buy one of their machines and make a bunch of 3d printed cassettes to hold all of my SMD parts, writing new software would probably be pretty easy, they run on 32 bit windows 7 embedded so time to whip out the ol .net stuff but probably pretty doable. would love to just upload a BOM and have it poop out little trays of everything I need
Great idea!
I can see where the kiosk platform ultimately failed, but I don’t understand why Redbox didn’t keep their streaming service up and running. That still would have made them some money and allowed the company to stay in business,.
I thought Netflix was the rebrand of their streaming service when it got spun off to it’s own company…
I expect I’ll be seeing those thin red dvd cases on discount shelves in the near future
I recommend looking up redbox tinkering website and discord as they have alot of information
For what its worth, there is still a lot of data stored on those. In fact, Ars Technica just noted that some people are using it to acquire information. Now much of this is probably outdated but… credit card numbers….