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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A judge overseeing Redbox owner Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s bankruptcy case granted a request Wednesday to convert it from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to Lowpass’ Janko Roettgers and The Wall Street Journal.
The company’s lawyers said Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment will lay off its remaining 1,000 employees and liquidate the businesses, including streaming operations and the 24,000 or so disc kiosks that have rented out DVDs, Blu-rays, and videogames for years.
Given the fact that there may also be at least the possibility of misappropriation of funds that were held in trust for employees, there is more than ample reason why this case should be converted.”
In addition to operating Redbox, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment also manages brands like Crackle and Screen Media.
Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Roettgers has been covering Redbox and its parent company’s recent troubles for The Verge, including a missed multimillion-dollar payment owed to NBCUniversal, the original bankruptcy filing, and Chicken Soup failing to make payroll for Redbox employees.
The original article contains 240 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 25%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Lots of poor people used Redbox.
At least poor people still have the public library.
For now.
Yarr.
Wealthy people also use it. I’m relatively well-off (not rich, but above average), and I love Redbox and was planning to use it more often now that streaming platforms are screwing everything up. I hate ads, and every streaming platform seems intent on shoving ads in my face.
I remember being able to rent video games from these. Some days you might see 2 people in line for one of these things.
I kind of want one of these to load up with my discs to just be a fancy frontend to pick out a movie for the night…
Anyone know how many discs these things hold? Gotta be a few hundred no?
“over 600”, considering how much shelf space it would take, to store 600+ movies in their covers; a redbox is probably a very space efficient way to store and resource optical media.
yeah I’d love to get my hands on one of these and just keep it in the Livingroom then. Put all the blurays in it. Let people borrow disks…
would be a cool project to replace their (more than likely) proprietary GUI with a custom one… I have RFID cards on hand. Could be cool to just assign cards to friends and let them come over and “rent” movies.
Make a “secret” menu for “renting” out Linux install disks to myself too. Forces me to keep shit organized.
Had good memories with this ngl
Ok hear me out, we rent all the media before they disappear. Then once the redbox disappears, there’s nowhere to return the disks.
No, in this capitalist world what will happen is that your account number becomes an asset during bankruptcy and they would sell that to some credit recovery agent who would sue you for some bullshit amount of money
That’s pretty much what Netflix did.
I hope of I were to get a pre-paid card and use that on a Redbox before they close them down that I could get away with getting free DVDs/Blu-ray, assuming that there’s anything good in them and that nobody comes after me for that.
I will not mind walking past the boxes anymore.
Wait, they still existed to this day? That’s impressive.
Literally last week my wife noticed one while out and remarked “I can’t believe they’re still around.”
I just sent the article to her with the caption “You did this!”
Um, yes? They’re literally in every grocery store and pharmacy, right next to the lottery machine.
Not an American. I just remember them from the South Park episode that made fun of them and Blockbusters in 2012.
Quick! Everybody run to redbox, and rent EVERYTHING.
Not like you have to return disks to a service and box thats no longer fuctional!
Yep…I see no flaws in this plan! Just a smart guy doing smart things!
Hey…we should build a monorail to the moon!!! And then brag about our redbox gains!!!
I was just at a store last week and they had a sign on the machine saying you can’t use it and it’s going away. I wonder what they’ll do with all those discs.
Before the pandemic, I used to watch a youtube channel of this guy who would dumpster dive gamestop.
He got so excited over finding what was in most cases trash.
Things like manuals, without a case or a game. Things like boxes for headphones, with no headphones.
Occasionally he’d find something decent…but never worth dumpster diving every night for.
The one thing that was strange was that gamestop almost always broke disks in half before throwing them out.
So I imagine thats what redbox will do.
The one thing that was strange was that gamestop almost always broke disks in half before throwing them out.
I think this is a common method to disincentivize people from taking stuff. Many moons ago I worked at Walmart and they did the same stuff in the claims area. They would damage everything to make it worthless and then either toss it in the trash compactor or send it back to the manufacturer. They damaged it to male sure that it couldn’t be sold again and to somewhat prevent people from using this as a method to ‘launder’ good items that they’d come back later to take home.
Redbox Gains. That sounds a lot like my failed thrash ambient band.
The issue here isn’t with the core idea Redbox is going for, the problem is rights holders not allowing interesting uses of their media.
I’d really like to see something like Redbox pivot into something with a much bigger catalogue and much lower operating costs. The kiosks could provide USB/HDMI dongles where pretty much any media can be loaded and displayed on a TV for a consistent price. That way they could offer a much larger catalog, don’t need to have someone physically move disks around, and the kiosks can be smaller since they don’t need a bank of DVDs and Blurays. They could have a digital distribution platform to complement it, where you can stream everything instead of going to a kiosk. And you don’t need any special equipment, pretty much everything has a USB or HDMI dongle.
Just think of going to a drive-thru and getting a dongle with your meal so you can watch a show with your fast food dinner. The only real logistics here is rebalancing the supply of these dongles, but that’s much simpler than restocking DVDs/Blurays. These dongles can also be incredibly cheap, probably something like $1-2 at scale, and they could be reused dozens if not hundreds of times. They could even partner with libraries to digitize their library so patrons don’t need to have a DVD/Bluray player to watch stuff.
But no, we can’t have nice things. I’m pushing back by cancelling my streaming services and going back to ripping DVDs/Blurays. I have nearly finished digitizing my collection of disks, and I’m going to be buying and ripping physical media going forward. Screw this slow march toward “you will own nothing and be happy” nonsense.
Allowing people to take rewritable media home and return it sounds like it would open the door for malware.
It’s possible, but with copy protections, it’s incredibly unlikely. You’d run an app on your computer or TV to decrypt and view the media, just like you do with Netflix or whatever.
that wouldn’t stop someone from dropping a “media player” on the drive with your logo on it that’s actually malware. People unfamiliar with how it’s supposed to work would plug that in and run it without even thinking about it. I guess you could have the machine format the drive every time it comes back and have it test for counterfeits to prevent that though now that I think about it more.
I guess you could have the machine format the drive every time it comes back
Yup, that’s the plan. You turn it in, it reimages it to whatever the next customer is likely to need, and if a customer asks for something out of left-field, it would reflash and take a bit longer.
Flashing on return is essential because it checks whether the returned item is still in working order, so it really wouldn’t be an issue.
The USB port of the machine is also an attack vector.
- Infect the machine and reprogram it to infect every drive being flashed
- Hacked media would install Bitcoin miners on the victim’s “smart” TV
- ???
- Profit
Eh, I suppose, but they could design the USB drive really hard to infect. The more narrow your use-case, the more options you have to secure it.
They could even limit it to just HDMI, which would probably be a lot harder to attack since HDMI doesn’t support much besides audio and video.
Wait, the Chicken Soup people own Redbox? Has that always been true?
RedBox was originally developed by McDonalds.
My redbox app already stopped working
I should see if I can find some working ones tomorrow and take out a few games and see what happens if I never return them lmao
Don’t you have to enter a credit card before it gives you the disc? I imagine they will just charge you later though maybe it’ll slio through the cracks.
It could potentially work out like netflix letting users keep the discs they had.
I doubt it’d slip through the cracks… The late fines are fully automated. The advertised price is a daily rental rate. For every day you have the item, you get charged that amount. Once you hit the maximum amount, it stops charging you and you can keep it (at that point, you’ve paid the full price of a new movie or game, but just own a second-hand one…)
In theory could you not use a prepay card unless it reserves a charge for the theoretical full amount up front?
Dedbox
I think I’ll take one home.
I wonder if you can install Linux on it?
I was talking to one of the repair guys working on one near me and he told me they already ran Linux, so they’re one step ahead of you
I’ll make it dispense AOL CDs from the 90s
Seems like it could be converted to a vending machine pretty easily if you could add your own OS
Already has security, waterproofing, payment processing stuff, and a screen to choose your item.
Just have to completely reconfigure everything physically and digitally. Or, sell something the size of a cd?
Oh hey, what about… movie rentals? That would be cool. No one does that anymore.
You could use it to sell decorative coasters.
