Redbox now has extras on their discs? (1 Viewer)

[RolandL]

Watched Joker and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood recently renting from Redbox. What surprised me is that the discs had the same extras as if you bought the Blu-ray. In past Redbox rentals, they only had the movie and no extras. Is this something new or have they been doing it for while?

 

[Reed Grele]

Haven't rented anything in a while. But T-Mobile Tuesday has a coupon for a free Redbox rental. Will have to check it out.

 

[Todd Erwin]

I suspect the reason why is the replication costs for studios to author a separate "rental" version just isn't cost effective anymore with the demise of Hollywood Video and Blockbuster, and the decreased business of Netflix's disc by mail service.

 

[skylark68]

A friend of mine rented the Joker the other day and noticed the same thing. I think Mr. Erwin is right and the costs of making separate rental versions just doesn't make financial sense anymore.

I rented Ad Astra from RedBox the other night but wasn't paying attention to whether it had extras on the disc.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

When they started making separate discs for rental only, physical media sales was a $20+ billion a year business. Today, it’s a $3 billion a year (and shrinking) business. I agree with Todd, it doesn’t make business sense for them to do two versions anymore.

 

[jcroy]

When they started making separate discs for rental only, physical media sales was a $20+ billion a year business. Today, it’s a $3 billion a year (and shrinking) business. I agree with Todd, it doesn’t make business sense for them to do two versions anymore.

Some dvd copies in bluray/dvd/digital combo packs also had different versions. For example in some Fox combo packs, the dvd disc from the combo set had the movie-only and sometimes a digital copy on the rest of the dvd disc.

As time went on, it seems like these special dvd copies were dropped and Fox (and others) just used the generic dvd version as the dvd disc in the bluray/dvd/digital combo packs.

 

[jcroy]

More generally, what was the reason for making differrent versions of rental dvd or bluray discs in the first place?

For example, did they skimp out on the audio and used a 2-channel or lossy 4-channel audio codec for which the patents have already expired? (ie. Less or zero royalty payments to companies like Dolby, etc ...).

 

[Josh Steinberg]

It was usually to strip out the bonus features. The idea being that by making the rental the movie-only product, it wouldn’t compete with the for-sale version. It was basically to leave an incentive to customers to buy the disc while not abandoning the revenue from the rental market.

The concept makes sense but it also adds an extra expense when you’re dealing with a physical product. The digital retailers do this now - most digital new releases have bonus features when you buy them, but the rental is just for the movie.

 

[David Wilkins]

Pressing a different run of discs for the rental market never made sense to me from a dollar standpoint. I can’t imagine that very many people were buying discs for bonus content alone, except for a few banner releases that are loaded with content. But even then, most people either want them or they don’t. Leaving content out always seemed more punitive than anything else.

And I’ve noticed that the last few discs I’ve had from Netflix have not been stripped. It seems to have gone hand in hand with them no longer delaying rental availability for a month, which seemed to me a more effective means of protecting sales than the expense of a separate run of stripped discs.

 

[RolandL]

Movies that are playing at theatres now, will be available for rental at Redbox this month.