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Redbox Streaming Service To Shut Down October 7th
An anonymous reader writes: Redbox, the company behind the giant red boxes at malls and grocery stores that dispense DVD and game rentals, partnered with Verizon in 2013 to launch a video streaming service to compete with Netflix. This naturally led to accusations that Verizon was throttling Netflix to tilt the scales in favor of Redbox. Well, as of Tuesday, they're packing it in. Redbox's streaming service will shut down at the end of the day on October 7th. They'll be refunding all current customers, though that number took a hit over the past several months as a credit card fraud problem caused Redbox to shut down their billing servers. This meant no new customers could sign up, and existing customers couldn't renew their subscriptions.
If you can't let your customers send you money, then there's not much point in being in business. Also, whoever was responsible for setting up their payment system won't be laying claim to that fact in their advertising and testimonial material.
Better known as 318230.
Some people don't have a broadband connection to support streaming media. It is a lot cheaper to rent a DVD or three each month than to support a broadband connection. It doesn't make them crazy.
Some people watch movies and other things that aren't available on streaming, but are available on DVD. It doesn't make them crazy.
Now, it is true that there are a lot of crazy people who don't have a broadband connection. And there are a lot of crazy people who watch movies and other things that aren't available on streaming. But that doesn't imply that renting DVDs is proof of being crazy.
It may just be a symptom!