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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

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whoisjuan

Wow I'm surprised that you didn't know about RedBox.

I have seen their kiosks in almost every major supermarket for years.

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I'm not from the states :) (.nl here)

Ohh! Gotcha. That makes sense.

I've heard of Redbox, but didn't hear about these codes.

Same here. I occasionally rent movies from Redbox and I wasn't aware of the codes. They're typically far cheaper than renting from Amazon. Sometimes I'll find a relatively newly released movie that I want to watch, and Amazon will want $5.99 to rent it (eg Blade Runner), versus ~$2.12 for the blu ray from Redbox. Amazon's digital rental prices are semi obnoxious at times; Alien Covenant is an ok movie that has been out on disc for a while, Amazon still wants $5.99 to rent it, you can buy the used blu ray from Redbox for $4.23 or rent it for half that. I have a box not far from my house, so I'll just grab the disc while out doing something else.

Also it's very common that getting the CD from amazon is cheaper than the $9.99 that they charge for albums. This is double crazy when you realize that buying many (most?) CDs on amazon cause the MP3s to be added to your amazon account as well.

Your local library might have those for free.

As a note, it's not Amazon deciding to make the rental price "obnoxious" to take high margins - it's driven by the wholesale prices that they are charged by content licensors for digital rentals.

(I know, this fact doesn't make the digital rental any cheaper...)

Do you have a source?

Either RedBox is losing money on each rental, or....

Redbox is a physical rental, not a digital.

I used to work at Amazon (in a different area, but collaborated with people in the video business) and I now work for a company that competes with Amazon's transactional video service.

The world of physical rental - at least in the US, not commenting globally - can rely on the First Sale Doctrine, which dramatically alters the economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

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