the company’s disc-dispensing kiosks are still strewn all over America. The machines still work and there are still hundreds of DVDs inside of them. Lately, those machines have been gettingwho have, in turn, been reverse-engineering them to figure out how they work, and to dispense the movies trapped inside.
Redbox swept onto the video rental scene in the early aughts, not long before the industry’s mom-and-pop store paradigm would be disrupted by the advent of Netflix and video streaming. Originally an offshoot of McDonald’s, the company expanded aggressively in the years after its founding. At one point, Redboxas the largest video rental retailer in the country. Now, of course, that’s all over, thanks to the dominance of streaming..