Flix on Stix is hoping to take on Redbox by making DVD rentals available on a different medium–USB memory drives. Rather than have rentals be available on DVDs like Netflix’s mail model or Redbox’s kiosks, Flix on Stix would allow renters to either rent at a Flix on Stix kiosk with their own memory drive or get one from the kiosk. The company is hoping to get initial service out within the next several months and plan to grow to 20,000 kiosks in the next year. The touchscreen kiosk will allow users to select the movie they want to rent, pay with a credit card, and then insert their own or obtain a provided USB drive to receive their rental. The company is claiming that USB 3.0 drives can take as little as 14 seconds for transferring the file over and USB 1.0 drives can take as long as 6 minutes, though they didn’t specify how big he videos are or what files or format the video is encoded as. And unlike Redbox, pricing varies by the number of days you want to rent, and after the rental period expires the video will delete itself so no returns are necessary.
It’s unclear also what set top boxes the videos will work under, but the company says that the files are protected with secure encryption to combat privacy. Guesses are that the company will pre-load its own self-running video player so that the files can play with the encryption.
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