LAS VEGAS — Outerwall Inc., the parent company of businesses including Coinstar and Redbox, is here at CES for the first time this week, showing off some of its newest kiosk ventures.
While meeting with Outerwall CEO Scott Di Valerio at the company’s booth, we got a chance to ask about the company’s future plans for movie streaming following its decision to end its Redbox Instant streaming venture with Verizon, which supplemented the DVD rental kiosk business with digital streaming subscriptions.
In short, he said, they’re still investigating their options, in light of what they learned from that experience.
The joint venture emerged on the scene in 2012 with an $8 per month subscription service, but it could not gain traction against the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Video.
One of the lessons they learned: Redbox customers are “transactional in nature,” preferring to make a la carte purchases, rather than paying for a monthly subscription, Di Valerio said.
As evidence of that point, he said, Redbox logged 775 million transactions at its kiosks in 2013, a massive number that significantly exceeds the transactions made through any individual video-on-demand service.
The other big lesson, he said, is that Redbox customers look to the company for new releases, which weren’t available through the streaming service. Explaining that to users proved complicated, he said.
“We learned a lot about our consumers — what they like, what they don’t like, what they trust about us, and we’ll put that into the evaluation that we do,” Di Valerio said.
Previously: Outerwall to receive $16.8 million payment as money-losing Redbox Instant joint venture winds down