Redbox, once a giant in the movie rental business, filed for bankruptcy in June.
Throwing away the roughly 900-pound kiosks isn’t as easy as it looks. Redbox’s machines store transaction data on their internal hard drives.
Redbox’s iconic red kiosks used to be the sign of a movie night at an affordable price. But now, they’re the digital skeletons of a bankrupt company that retailers say is a bane on their property.
One person’s trash can be another person’s treasure, though. And if the rise of nostalgia has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always have a soft spot for things that were good to us.
The Iconic Red Kiosk
Redbox wasn’t always the plague of retailers. I remember faithfully going to the Redbox at the grocery store in Texas while I was home for college to rent movies to watch with my mom. While I was already a Netflix customer, my mom didn’t Wi-Fi, so it was a good option.
The DVD rental company was founded by McDonald’s in 2002, though it would end up having a variety of owners over the years. It was a simple concept, for years allowing customers to rent a DVD for $1 a day before it gradually increased prices. For convenience, the company allowed renters to return the DVDs at whatever Redbox kiosk they liked, not limiting them to the original one. Redbox even offered video game rentals.
More than 68% of the U.S. population lived five minutes away from a Redbox kiosk at one point, according to an archived version of the company’s website. Throughout its lifetime, the company carried out 6 billion DVD rentals. Alas, streaming would do to Redbox what it did to Blockbuster. As consumer viewing habits changed, Redbox’s struggles grew greater.
“Everyone knew that this was eventually going to go away,” a former Redbox executive told The Verge earlier this year.
In June, after acquiring nearly $1 billion in debt, Redbox’s new parent company, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, declared bankruptcy. Redbox was gone.
24,000 Abandoned Rental Kiosks
After Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for bankruptcy in June, it left Redbox’s red kiosks where they were: at grocery stores, fast food restaurants, pharmacies, and other locations. Walgreens has complained it pays $184,000 per month to power roughly 5,400 machines on its premises. Others say they worry about people trying to steal DVDs from the defunct kiosks, which typically held around 600 discs.
Throwing the approximately 24,000 abandoned machines away isn’t easy. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, some Redbox kiosks are hardwired into the retailer’s electrical system or bolted down to concrete foundations. Furthermore, outdoor machines contain a coolant that can be harmful to the environment without precautions.
There’s also the question of data. According to Sherwood, kiosk experts say that Redbox machines store transaction data locally on their hard drives, which may contain credit card data, email addresses, and customer names and physical addresses. The company stored data locally, Sherwood reported, to keep the kiosks operational at all times in case there were problems with the Internet connection say, during a storm.
Currently, retailers are asking the judge in charge of Redbox’s bankruptcy proceedings for permission to throw away the kiosks—requests the judge has been granting. It’s not clear what measures, if any, the retailers are taking to protect the data in the machines or whether that’s even their responsibility. Experts say that the machines will likely be sold for scrap metal.
From Trash to Treasure
As retailers struggle to get rid of the kiosks, which can weigh up to 890 pounds, they’ve found that there are number of regular people interested in taking them off their hands.
Redbox kiosks are seen as a good purchase by tinkerers and reverse engineers, 404Media reported, who are making offers to buy the machines or just getting them for free from fed-up retailers. There’s even a Discord community called “Redbox Tinkering,” which includes advice on how to obtain a machine, transport it, open it, and disassemble it from home.
“[J]ust ask the store manager if you can have it. They will most likely tell you to just take it, but don’t just take it without asking,” the community’s FAQ states.
There are a variety of reasons why people could want the machines. Some who spoke to 404Media say they want to see how their operating system works (and install Doom). Broulfy, one of the tinkerers in the Discord, told the outlet that they want to create their own movie storage system and app.
“I am using the machine to make my own version of the App to effectively do the same thing the original software does, but with my own spin on it,” Broulfy said. “I mainly want to use it to create a massive DVD/Blu-Ray storage machine with ease of use for retrieving the movies.”
Collectors are interesting in the kiosks, too. Jacob Helton, a 19-year-old from North Carolina, got his kiosk when he bumped into a contractor that was getting ready to haul the Redbox machine off. They started talking and he made a deal, Helton told the Journal. Like Broulfy, Helton wants to use the machine to store his own movies and games, but he also wants to preserve a bit of history.
“I wanted a Redbox machine because I felt like Redbox is important in the history of American media,” Helton said. “Its collapse marks the end of the video rental era.”
Images | Phillip Pessar | m01229 | Thomas Hawk
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