Less than a year after Netflix shipped its last DVD, Redbox is shutting down its operations and closing its 24,000 rental kiosks, in another devastating blow to the rest of the DVD business.
Redbox DVD kiosk rental company closes after parent company files for bankruptcy
Redbox, a fixture outside grocery stores and pharmacies for the better part of two decades, defied the odds and outlasted rivals like Blockbuster. (Redbox’s official Twitter/X-bio reads: “We’re still around. Thanks for asking.”) Still, the company couldn’t escape the realities of running a physical media business in a post-streaming world, with annual profit declines for more than a decade.
The DVD industry as a whole isn't faring much better than Redbox. Notably, Digital Entertainment Group stopped tracking DVD rental sales as its own category in its annual report released earlier this year. The report cited Netflix's discontinuation of its DVD rental service as the cause, and noted that total physical rental revenues were down more than 50 percent from the previous year.
DEG didn’t disclose the exact number in the report, opting instead to combine physical sales and rentals into a new “Physical Product” metric, but VIP+ estimated physical rental revenue for 2023 at around $225 million. Next year’s report won’t track physical rental revenue at all, instead focusing solely on physical sales.
