Written by T.C. | Posted in Business

Today’s business world moves quickly. It was only a handful of years ago that Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video were the undisputed champs of home viewing movie distribution. Today, with companies such as Netflix offering to deliver movies to your home on a regular basis, and picking up the postage for shipping in both directions, it’s no surprise that they’re taking a bigger and bigger bite out of the market for those brick and mortar type video stores.

With that said, what do you imagine could rival the convenience of at home delivery such as Netflix?  One option is the on demand services offered by many cable companies. This is like when you’re in a hotel room and you get to see a choice of movies offered, and if you want to watch one, you select it and start it right then. This is much more convenient than the now outdated movie service of pay-per-view where a movie starts at a given time, and you need to be ready when it starts. The control has to be in the consumers hands for something to work these days.

Surprisingly, there is a new competitor in the DVD market that I don’t think many people saw coming, but it makes perfect sense. That is the DVD kiosk, which is essentially a vending machine. Redbox is one such company that offers DVD vending machines, and its growth over the past handful of years has been nothing short of spectacular.

In 2002, the idea of having vending machine suppliers handle recent release movies was just that; an idea. They started with a dozen kiosks. In three years that grew to 900 and by mid 2009 they had more than 16,000 machines and were adding at a rate of one per hour!  There’s no doubt about it… vending machines today can serve up a whole lot more than just soda, coffee or gumballs!

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