November 11th, 2009
Blockbuster initiating rentals via SD cards at store kiosks
Blockbuster isn’t going down without a fight. Their newest attempt to get customers in their stores and away from Netflix.com is a new rental system in which film lovers can rent movies via SD cards at a kiosk machine. Sounds like we still have to leave the house for that one.
For $1.99 per rental, Blockbuster members can load movies on to their SD cards and then play them on the media player of their choice. Blockbuster’s way of assuring that the rental is just a rental (and the video doesn’t last on your memory card forever) is a DRM (digital rights management) system that includes an expiration date. Viewers have 30 days to watch, and then 48 hours before its gone forever. Supposedly the video quality on the SD cards will be far superior than anything you can stream from Netflix or Hulu, so if you prefer quality over ease, then this could suit you. You also can’t stream EVERYTHING on Netflix yet nor download any film from Apple iTunes, thus, if someone is looking for a particular title not found on these services, this might just work.
It’s not entirely clear why the settled on SD cards first, as CrunchGear makes a good point that few personal media players support them. If Blockbuster really wants to make this new idea work, they should incorporate every kind of memory card as well as USB devices to reach as many potential customers as possible.
Would you leave the convenience of your home computer for this new plan?
Rachel started playing with her mother's old Brownie camera when she was just a toddler, working her way up from a Hello Kitty point-and-shoot to training on both film and digital SLRs. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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