Details are still pretty hard to come by but the long-rumored partnership seems to have come to fruition. The companies sent out a press release this morning for the still-unnamed service which will be launching in the second half of this year. Verizon will own a 65% stake in the venture and will use Redbox kiosks to fulfill the DVD/Blu-Ray craving portion of the market. It will be interesting to see how the studios and content producers cotton to this notion since Redbox has been known to play kind of dirty, buying discs wherever it can when denied sales by studios looking to sell movies to consumers rather than make them available to rent.
Verizon talked about how great it would work in the press release:
This venture between Verizon and Redbox will create the kind of national multi-platform product that customers are demanding from video entertainment service providers. It will leverage Verizon’s industry-wide relationships with entertainment content providers, its advanced cloud computing technologies and state-of-the-art IP network infrastructure to distribute video on-demand content to its customers.
Can Verizbox beat Netflix at being a disc/stream service (colored red)? Too early to say. But we’re seeing more of the creeping power of Verizon here. Already on the way to owning wireless, will they own entertainment too?
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
