Tag Archive | "kiosk industry news"
Blockbuster Express Adds Online Movie Rental and Reservation
Blockbuster Express has finally put its online location and reservation system into place! You can now go to the Blockbuster Express site, search for a movie, find nearby kiosks and determine whether it is in stock, reserve it, and then show up and pick it up! Very simple process and that helps to remove one very glaring distinction between Redbox and Blockbuster Express. The online system even accepts promo codes! So head over to the Blockbuster Express site and reserve your movie tonight!
Continue reading...Blockbuster Express Brings the Kiosks Home To Texas!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
NCR has an agreement in place with Brookshire Grocery Stores to install its Blockbuster Express DVD rental kiosks in its more than 150 stores across Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi within the first quarter of 2010. Last year, NCR acquired The New Release (TNR), the number 2 player in the DVD rental kiosk business, based in Houston, TX. TNR’s primary market was in the grocery market. This continues with those roots as well as being in a Texas grocery chain. Don Gaynier, Brookshire Grocery Company said, “We considered many of the leading DVD kiosk providers, and we were most impressed with NCR’s rapid growth in the space.” NCR began deploying Blockbuster Express kiosks in Brookshire Grocery in 2009, with about 100 kiosks installed at the chain at the end of the year. According to Gaynier, “For more than 80 years, Brookshire Grocery has strived to give our customers a great shopping experience
Continue reading...NCR Launches Outdoor DVD Rental Kiosk
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Blockbuster Express rental locations near to me are both at Sonic Drive-Ins. A particular thing to note about a drive-in location is the fact that the kiosk must be outdoor. So after some testing at these locations, NCR has officially launched the NCR SelfServ Entertainment 2381. Able to hold as many as 950 DVDs, this weather-protected outdoor kiosk is the most secure and highest-capacity outdoor DVD-rental kiosk in the industry. This will now allow NCR to launch Blockbuster Express kiosks through many more 24-hour smaller footprint locations. One of the key things that Redbox has been able to do to get a great foothold in the industry is to place the kiosks at key locations outdoors
Continue reading...University of Hartford Gets a Blockbuster Express Kiosk
Friday, January 29, 2010
The first Blockbuster Express kiosk was just placed at the University of Hartford’s Gengras Student Union. According to Thomas Perra the University’s Associate Vice President and Treasurer, “Besides treasury, investments…I’m always looking for opportunities for non-tuition revenue.” According to Perra, about 5-10% of the rental revenue from the machine would go to the school in the form of “Auxiliary Revenues.” NCR, which operates Blockbuster Express, is even promoting the facility with rent one/get one free deals and having Friday rentals not due back for the whole weekend until Monday. Perra and NCR are currently researching other locations on campus where at least one more machine can be placed.
Continue reading...Will Christmas Blu-Ray Push Kiosks To Blu-Ray
Friday, December 11, 2009
One of the hottest selling items this Christmas is the Blu-Ray player. A significant number of the big sales at discount stores and electronic houses were trying to get blu-ray players under $200 or even under $100! Walmart had 5 blu-ray players in its Black Friday ads this year. One of those, the Magnavox Blu-Ray DVD Player, NB500MG1F was an astounding $78! Even one of my favorites, the Samsung BD-P1590 Blu-Ray Disc Player which supports Netflix and Pandora streaming is only $99.99 at TigerDirect . With this push to get players into the households, will we see an upswing in Blu-Ray discs? I’m not sure it’ll really jump because of that. I’m finding that in my own household, what is holding me back is the rental kiosks not stocking Blu-Ray. You see, I don’t feel the need to own too many movies these days, and with Netflix streaming and all of the free Video on Demand I’m pretty much a movie renter these days. Its cheaper to rent the movie the 4-5 times I’ll watch it over my lifetime than to own it. But that’s only feasible when its fast and easy to rent it at only $1 per day. With all of the rental kiosks near my house (I have 10 within a mile – one of those is Blockbuster Express ), I can make a quick trip down the street and pick up most any movie I want to watch. If the movie is one of those that my younger kids might watch over and over, well they don’t really care whether its in Blu-Ray or VHS! So those movies tend to be in DVD format because they are cheap and can be backed up. So I really don’t have a need for a Blu-Ray player even at $78 because I cannot get the movies from the DVD rental kiosks yet. I realize its a chicken and egg situation. Once the kiosks start making Blu-Ray’s available, I’ll probably get a player. Or I might finally succumb to the Netflix streaming and purchase one just for that and get the Blu-Ray as a bonus. Meanwhile, I guess I’ll put my HD-DVD player I ran out and purchased early up on eBay .
Continue reading...Will Blockbuster Deploy Rental Kiosks In Their Own Stores?
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
I have long wondered if Blockbuster will bring Blockbuster Express Kiosks into their stores. I actually created this draft for a story July 3rd of 2009 but didn’t really have any content. But with the rollout this week of the SD downloadable kiosks, Blockbuster Express in a Blockbuster store is exactly what seems to be happening. As Blockbuster closes stores rapidly, they are actually turning their efforts back to their kiosks to keep the company alive. Primarily the DVD kiosks are finding themselves in places where people frequent on a regular basis other than a video rental store; grocery stores, convenience stores, dollar stores (which are seeing a huge climb this year due to the economic situation), and even fast food restaurants. People have to make a specific trip to go to a Blockbuster location both for rental and return. It is very common for there to be a Blockbuster Express kiosk in a store within the same complex where a brick-and-mortar store is. It seems like 30% of all the Publix stores out there where kiosks are have a Blockbuster in the same parking lot! But if you are like me, if I did walk into a Blockbuster store I’d just as soon deal with a kiosk there than deal with the people working there. But from a company perspective, there is no reason to use a kiosk inside a brick-and-mortar store. You have significant expenses in that brick-and-mortar store. But that all just changed. Now we have the pilot program of the downloadable content kiosks. Because these require a little more than you can do at a simple kiosk, namely checkout of a hardware device, they are being placed in the Blockbuster locations. Right now, when you download content, it cannot be played back with many devices (as far as anyone knows, only one device at the moment). So the stores are providing a device that goes along with your downloadable content that you can hook up to your TV and watch. We can presume that there will be some way to move the content later so that it can be played on the devices that people actually have. For myself, that would be an iPhone, AppleTV, or the Roku player. So I wonder if DVD rental will also be something you can do at the kiosk and how that will affect the store sales. Leave me your thoughts and comments.
Continue reading...NCR and MOD Systems Debut Downloadable Kiosks
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
NCR Corp. is pilot testing a new model of its Blockbuster Express-branded movie-rental kiosks that allow patrons to download a movie to a secure digital (SD) memory card. No details have been given yet about what devices the video can be played back on. Samsung and others have announced or released TV sets that have SD card slots which presumably would play the content. Several Inside BlockBuster Express members have emailed or posted wondering whether the content will play on their portable devices. At this point, I haven’t had anyone run into one of these kiosks to determine that answer. If you know of one and can test, please let us know! The announcement says that the pilot test machines operated by NCR in conjunction with MOD Systems are located in select Blockbuster locations and other retail stores. NCR has said before that it strongly believes in the digital download model. Its existing Blockbuster Express kiosks are “digital download ready” and NCR plans to rapidly expand use of the technology through its existing kiosk base. Rentals from the digital download kiosks will be tested at various prices. Similar to rental practices on Cable Pay-per-View and iTunes rentals, consumers will have 30 days from purchase to watch the movie. Once they begin viewing it, they have 48 hours to finish watching it before digital rights management technology automatically locks the content to prevent further viewing.
Continue reading...NCR VP Alex Camara Talks About Blockbuster Express and the DVD Kiosk Industry
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Alex Camara, who left Redbox parent company Coinstar and joined NCR in June 2009 as the VP and General Manager of the Entertainment division, knows the DVD kiosk industry well. He sat down with Danny King over at Video Business for an interview. You can find the full text at Video Business Online . In the interview he tries to distinguish how Blockbuster Express is and will be different from Redbox. By having double the capacity and by working on a future with digital downloads they hope to differentiate themselves. He also states his understanding that consumers expect them to provide new release movies on the release date but that they must work hand-in-hand with the studios to make that happen. He believes that the DVD Kiosk marketplace has not stolen from the home entertainment pie but has, in fact, grown it. Check out the full interview at Video Business .
Continue reading...Photos
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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