I had no idea this book had a company and that the company owned Redbox. Wasn’t their original products Christian themed inspirational novels about people coming back from the dead, with a different version for every demographic?
They were inspirational literature compiled from oral history, inviting everyday people to share inspiring real life stories that they would compile and publish in themed collections.
The market for inspirational literature includes many religious people in general, and they had no reason to exclude stories infused with religious or Christian content, but most of the many books were not Christian themed per se (although some explicitly were).
That they admitted Christian stories at all, or sometimes used striaghtforward Christian references in some titles or prefaces was enough to make them unpalatable to some, of course.
I had a bunch of these books as a kid. I don’t remember any overtly Christian themes, just what was essentially a modernized version of Aesop’s fables.
But I was also pretty young so maybe I just missed that part.
I had the same thing about Narmia — only learned as an adult that it was a Christian set of books. By then I’d learned a bit about Christianity so in re read them but still have no idea. Perhaps they aren’t christian and I was just being pranked.
The books are heavily allegorical and knowledge of who Aslan represents is usually enough to clue people in that it’s clearly a Christian metaphor, but I could easily see someone that didn’t have that background missing it. Even as a kid that grew up with a high level of Christian indoctrination a lot of the metaphorical concepts went over my head at the time. For example, in The Silver Chair there are rich metaphors about sin and salvation surrounding the characters that were totally unknown/unnoticed to me as a child, even though I knew all of the themes from my upbringing.
They absolutely come from a Christian worldview and tell some classic Christian tales in a different way. They're "Christian" in that sense, but they aren't proselytizing or anything. They demonstrate that good literature is just good literature. It doesn't matter what the worldview is.
Interestingly (for me) the Narnia series is one that I picked up on being allegorical pretty fast. Not exactly the first book, but I think by the middle of the second I had figured it out. Definitely by the time Aslan was resurrected.
That’s what I remember. Someone got me “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul” (I was 8 or 9). It had a section called “Tough Stuff” and it had stories of abusive parents and family. I think my parents blindly let me read it because of the “Cristian Themed” association.
The original book was a virtual money press for Jack Canfield. No surprise he'd form a business around it. Near as I can tell, the Chicken Soup stuff was generic motivational stories intended to lift your spirits. Canfield was a motivational speaker as well, and like many motivational speakers, eventually found that the only takers for his services were multilevel pyramid schemes.
> In 2008, the founders, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, sold the company to a new ownership group led by William J. Rouhana and Robert D. Jacobs.[20]
I don't know anything beyond that but to me this reads like: finance guys looking to pull off sort of a "media rollup [1]" start by buying a well-known brand, name the company after it, then buy a fairly random assortment of ill-fitting (and in the case of Redbox, just plain doomed) media properties. And, here we are at the predictable end.
It's popular in rural areas where people don't have fast enough Internet to stream movies. And/or, they can't afford Internet speeds that fast. Not a demographic you're going to see represented on HN much, but a lot of the US (by geography, not population) doesn't have fast-enough Internet for Netflix without it being choppy. Tried to show my Dad a funny Youtube video when I visited him on his farm and it was so choppy it was basically unwatchable
To the contrary it worked pretty well in the city, esp with $0.50 deals and transit commutes; I could grab a movie and groceries after work and walk my 3 blocks to my apartment.
I thought it might work well in a small town, but they required 10k daily people foot traffic to qualify for a kiosk
I see them in small towns all over that absolutely do not have 10k in daily people foot traffic, including the town that I grew up in. So that cannot be accurate
I live in a rural area known as Redmond, WA, where Comcast is unable to furnish consistent Internet access. It is also home to Microsoft, though that part of Redmond isn’t rural. I live a full 6 miles from Microsoft HQ.
Probably a little more accurate to say that they can’t afford internet at all, due to poor credit or a long prior stream of unpaid bills with the internet provider.
From this article [1] written in 2019, I have gleaned that of the 27% of the Americans that do not pay for broadband, 50% say that cost is a factor and 21% say cost is THE factor. I can agree that the costs are ridiculous (Comcast keeps raising my prices), but that isn't exactly the same thing as "being unable to afford it". 22% say it's because service is not available (or unacceptable) and 7% say that's the only reason.
I didn't have broadband until I moved out (this was long after broadband was widely available), dial-up was the only option because AT&T never bothered to install the equipment that would enable DSL for our address. Today, 15 years later, their only options aside from dial-up are cellular data plans and satellite Internet, which are sub-par, prohibitively expensive, or both.
And now i get to diatribe, even though i laughed at your other comment.
I have at&t fixed wireless. Until tomorrow - at&t is discontinuing it; as they discontinued copper ADSL, as they discontinued pre-paid ipad SIM cards, they now discontinue wireless uverse. The replacement product "isn't available in my area" and probably won't ever be, there's just not enough towers to support the speed metric they want.
I have starlink, but i live in the middle of a national forest and there's no place to put the dish where it doesn't have service interruptions. It's great for downloading things, but awful at nearly everything else, such as realtime communication, quickly looking things up via a series of browser tabs, and online gaming.
My only other option is hughesnet; and i don't consider 1500ms ping times and severe 2000s era bandwidth caps and speeds to really be an option. T-mo doesn't have penetration for "wireless home internet", nor verizon, i have tried both. There's 3+ fiber runs along the highway near my house (highway in name only!). One is a backhaul for centurylink - no consumer access. Another is Suddenlink - they got a tax benefit for running fiber to public schools, and are not tapping the lines for any consumers. at&t has the third line, but they want $15,000 for a loop, and at the time i was researching it, at&t wanted ~$1,200/mo for 1gbit and $8900 for 10gbit. Fortunately Optimum is currently running a fourth fiber line down the same highway, and my understanding is they charge $155 for 1gbit service.
Currently, for the garbage internet service i have here, i am paying over $300/month. thankfully that gets reduced tomorrow, as i won't be able to get service from at&t even if i wanted to. As someone who could 40% utilize a gbit connection 24/7 at-will, this is extremely frustrating. The tradeoff is i live in a rainforest and 90% of the time there's no indication that other humans exist around here.
ymmv, my FICO is available upon triplicate request.
This is funnily ironic. My broadband service <<as a pipe>> is very good. I saw a comment above from someone in Redmond regarding Comcast.
I'm kind of "at two" with a lot of the cloud religion; I'm intimately aware that it's a first world problem and that the cloud as we know it is a North American / Western European phenomenon. Sure, talk to anyone anywhere in the world and "the cloud is great" but it doesn't mean the same thing when the nearest cloudy datacenter is 500 miles and an international border away. Or even in Eastern Washington State.
I had two internet feeds until last year. One was DSL, with two fixed IPv4 addresses; the other was broadband. The DSL had some advantages, although throughput was not one of them.
A couple of years ago some meth head cut the cable head (right down to the ground! a couple pounds of copper??) out of a punchdown box by the side of the road. CenturyLink fixed it, but I think it was the beginning of the end. Last year they gave notice that copper line service could stop at any time without notice and wouldn't be restored.
Luckily the local option broadband operator (who leases a /17 from the City, we'll get to that) decided to make an offer that was too good to be true at about that time: $116/mo for 500mbit and two free fixed addresses to go with it.
Unfortunately Rainier Connect / Lightcurve can't competently operate reverse DNS, preferring to impersonate the lessor's /16 rather than configure 128 /24s. The PTR space is littered with defunct resolutions for customers they have lost. And the lessor, the City of Tacoma, won't accept email from their own address space so there's nobody to complain to. I've manage to shame / embarrass Lightcurve enough that they fixed some other egregious issues.
For some silly reason (besides the fact that I offer a TCP table plugin for Postfix which supports nontrivial aliases) I want email-at-rest to be on computers which I own on premises I own, and proper reverse DNS is necessary for that.
In conclusion, even in the first world with a cloudy datacenter virtually down the street the necessary business predicates to correct technical implementation and operation aren't universally present. If you look hard at the cloud and squint you can see it there, too.
No, i don't like anything produced after ~2001 with a couple of exceptions; especially television shows. I was just talking about how many optical discs i have in storage, but i have over 1200 "DVD", and about half that in audio discs (unripped, just stored). I only own a dozen bluray, and all those were re-releases of movies from before 1990, even.
So i stop by the redbox sometimes, but the only thing i ever rented out of them was games. I played skyrim and fallout 4 via redbox, for example, back when they came out for playstation.
That's a nonsensical reach. The United States, especially in rural areas have internet access that is considered laughable and has nothing to do with their financial situation.
I have observed this effect directly in real life.
If life circumstances get away from you and you get to the point where the one provider wired to your area, like spectrum say, gets turned off for non payment after months of ignored bills, you may well find yourself without any plausible path to have the resources to turn it back on.
All it takes is a life based on something like shift or manual work and a medical or family crisis.
People really have no idea what life is actually like in most of this country it seems.
I’m a millennial and I still enjoy it for the nostalgia trip from time to time. I have a $20 DVD player I got from Walmart a few years ago whose sole purpose is Redbox nostalgia playback.
I will say it’s pretty rare I get that itch these days, since basically any movie is instantly available.
Hits harder when you’re in the middle of nowhere with terrible internet though. Even then though half the time someone has offline stuff on some device
The key feature IMO was the ability to return at any terminal. When every Walmart had one it became a great resource on cross country road trips with younger kids.
They have a specifically Christian version of the book available, but in general, no, it was not Christian themed. They were self-help and inspirational stories.
People talk about zero interest rate phenomenons and this seems to be like another case. Lots of companies making bad decisions right before the interest rates went up. Wonder how many more bankruptcies we'll see in the next year and a half.
I'd never heard of this deal but wow, what a blunder. They merged with Redbox in 2022, assuming $350m in debts and taking over their 27000 vending machines. Since then they managed to dig that hole to a cool billion dollars. Insane that anyone thought DVD vending machines was a great idea in 2022.
I think there is a market for them. Think of the many people who still have terrible internet, with no hope for improvement. Getting a weekend movie for significantly cheaper than a theater experience is going to make financial sense.
Even if you have streaming subscription(s) you have to break out your abacus to determine if your service(s) have rights to the movie this month.
That being said, I have no idea what are their expenses. On the surface, it feels like they should have low costs, so I might be making wild assumptions. Or maybe there is a Bain Capital like situation behind the scenes intentionally destroying the business.,
> Think of the many people who still have terrible internet, with no hope for improvement.
Umm, I'm thinking, but the best I can come up with:
1. Rural/extremely out-of-the-way locations. Which means that locating a Redbox that is profitable is going to be extremely difficult because by definition you're in low-density areas.
2. Extremely poor people. Even most lower class people have cell phones these days where you can watch video, so the number of people in reasonably dense areas who can't afford broadband is going to be very low.
I do think the "multiple subscription services" issue is a valid point, but in general I think that most Redbox users are likely just slow adopters, similar to folks with landlines. The problem is that customer base slowly but surely goes away.
The local Redbox machines here seem to do steady business. I see people using them almost every time I get groceries.
Rural people who can't get internet at home likely can't get good cell service at home either. You only have to be a few miles off of the main roads before service degrades rapidly.
Also, the unbanked. People who have money but bad or no credit.
But all that said, while it might still be possible to make some money with DVD rental vending in 2024, but it's not a growth business at all.
I think the other comments still hold,
Just because there are customers, it doesn't mean that you can make profit from them.
Not sure what their margins are, but someone in an older comment said that Redboxes require foot traffic of 10k+. These things seem to require at a least weekly visits, restock, etc.
Also been awhile since I have seen a Redbox, but do they take cash? I thought they were Credit Cards only.
I have good internet and I'm not poor, but I don't do streaming services. That whole scene is just more hassle than it's worth to me. I also rarely use RedBox (but I do occasionally), so I am probably an oddball.
You're mistaken. No offense, but I think maybe you haven't been out and about much, or (reasonably!) haven't been paying attention to little local details when you have been.
Like coin exchangers and lottery scratcher machines, Redbox kiosks exist pretty much wherever the bulk of a community buys stuff for their fridge: supermarket, dollar store, convenience store, etc.
They're extremely well distributed.
And until Starlink, which is new and expensive and unfamiliar, many more (North American) communities than you think did not offer home broadband that was suitable for reliable streaming. Service was still traditional satellite, weak DSL, and maybe 3G in many places.
Plus, what made Redbox appealing to many was that you could spend a few dollars for a familiar, popular film when you had a few dollars to spare instead of committing to a whole bunch of recurring subscriptions just to hope that the title you want would eventually come up.
Certainy, the business model as a whole is becoming increasingly strained, but it continues to serve consumer needs that still aren't serviced vert well by anybody else. It's a sort of crossover point, but if the company collapses instead of restructures, it's going to disappoint and frustrate quite a lot of people.
I think you may have misunderstood my comment. I was not at all saying that people and places without high speed Internet don't exist. I was saying that the people and places that only have poor Internet services (poor people and rural areas) are also the people and places for which building a profitable Redbox distribution channel is most difficult, if not impossible given this bankruptcy news.
It's funny you go into details about how used these things are in response to an article about the company going bankrupt. Clearly you have something figured out that they don't. Maybe there's an opportunity for you.
Huh? A busines becoming unsustainable or unprofitable is completely different than its products having been entirely unused. My comment even noted that they seem to be at or beyond some crossover point in viability.
They had as many as 42,000 kiosks. Tens of thousanda remain. They are used every day. Yet the future of the company looks bleak and the finances are in crisis. All those things can be true at once.
Part of the problem is that public libraries also generally lend DVDs et al for free.
If your local library is well funded, most new titles appear on shelves pretty quickly after release.
The target demographics of people who can't afford or for whom internet is totally unavailable for streaming are much better served by their public library. It's generally funded by your city, county, or property taxes and pretty much any resident of the locality gets free access.
That leaves extremely rural locations as a target for Redbox, which is generally a pretty small market.
This may be a case of "there's a business there, but it's not this business". You can always take a sensible business and turn it into selling $1 for $0.75 and go deeper and deeper into debt while buying market share, while at the same time making it impossible for anyone else who wants to actually make money to compete.
(I have no idea how to turn this into any sort of law but companies really shouldn't be allowed to just dive into debt, conquer a market via selling dollar bills for 75 cents, then collapse into a puff of compounded interest and massive losses and destroy the entire segment they are in as they collapse. I suppose just not having interest rates at effectively 0 will likely do the trick eventually.)
The problem solves itself until venture capital arrives and decides that pouring $2 billion into a market that doesn’t make economic sense is the sane thing to do just in case one day it becomes a $200 billion market.
It doesn't need to be a law, if the government steps out of the way the natural laws will shut the business down. But if the government bails them out then I guess we don't believe in natural laws.
Terrible internet? You watch a movie once a month max or less? You find it less confusing the the stream service mess where movies are constantly moving around and the interface changes all the time so you can never find what you were looking for once you do finally learn it?
For one, Redbox has (or had) coupons and codes and stuff like that all the time where you can get free/reduced nights. They used to be one of the T-Mobile Tuesdays offers quite often, for example.
For another, it used to be the case that Redbox would have things well before you could stream them, or when they could only be streamed expensively. Various waves of the distributors making it more annoying for Redbox to buy the discs, pushing things to their own streaming services very early, and just generally the downturn of physical video media all blunted those positives though.
I used to use it semi-regularly for Blu-rays even not that long ago, but the kiosks around me have started to go away and the available selection and timing of releases is way worse than it used to be.
They really just have everything working against them: the ongoing huge shift to streaming, the pandemic and strikes putting holes in the release calendar, Marvel and DC both stumbling, interest rates...
That's presumptive on having Internet at all, but even so people make poor economic decisions all the time. Think of title loan and paycheck loan places, grocery shopping at the dollar store. You get the idea. And the fact that at times movies can be released to dvd before they're released to streaming. For that matter even if it's available to stream it may not be available to stream on your service. Does you no good that Suits is currently on Netflix if you're a Hulu subscriber.
If Bob watches one movie a month, you won’t have a good business. If there are thousands of Bobs in one area, you can do just fine.
Meanwhile no streaming service will ever get Bob to sign up.
As an silly example: no one rents carpet cleaners every weekend, you can still rent carpet cleaning machines. There is enough demand in aggregate for it to be viable.
That "if" is doing a ton of work there, and even if we grant it, you've got physical costs that scale with the number of locations, which doesn't apply to streaming.
True. But it’s not like Redbox is launching the kiosks today, that’s already sunk cost because they’ve made them all. Sure they need repair and stuff but they’re basically vending machines so I’m guessing there’s somewhat sturdy. And loading new movies in/taking old ones out could be done by the employees of the stores they are located in as part of the placement agreement.
Could you start a Redbox from scratch? I kind of doubt it. I think the costs would overwhelm you. But that’s not the position they’re in.
I’m not saying you’re going to become a fortune 500 company on the business model. But I think there’s enough for a real business to survive there, depending on the areas where you place the kiosks.
However Redbox has history and the agreements may not be as favorable to them as they would need to keep operating, or they may have a lot more debt than necessary.
There are a lot of Bobs out there though. It’s not a big theoretical.
As someone just-barely-around for the 90s, I would have expected the franchise to be older than that. As someone who's never read one of their books, they seemed old when they were apparently still new.
I thought Redbox competed with Netflix back in the day? Instead of getting a DVD mailed to me, Redbox would spit one out in person. Anyone remember this?
it was a different segment. Redbox was more like holloywood video or blockbuster - new releases are more prominent. for the past 3 years though you couldn't tell by looking, but there haven't been many new releases so the selection has more old releases. Netflix (dvd.com) had tv shows, and a rather large back catalogue of dvd releases that weren't available on any streaming services, nor brick&mortar, nor redbox.
In that both services were relatively easy to use to get DVDs, they're similar.
