Remember Redbox? Meet the People Bringing These Old Machines Into Their Homes
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
In front of stores like Walgreens, Walmart, Dollar General, and other mega chains across the US, stand thousands of Redbox machines. The first of the DVD rental kiosks debuted in Denver in 2004, and at its height, the company had around 34,000 machines throughout the country. The rental service was something of an intermediary between the heyday of Blockbuster video stores and our current streaming era. It was particularly appealing for those who were put off by the recurring credit card charges of subscribing to Netflix, which launched in 1998 as a mail-order DVD service, or later, once streaming took hold in the 2010s, for those in rural areas without a strong enough Wi-Fi connection to stream films. Then, a couple of decades following Redbox’s founding, the lawsuits started rolling in: 7-Eleven, CVS, and NBC Universal all had filed lawsuits against the company by early 2024 for unpaid commission fees in the first two cases, and unpaid licensing fees in case of the latter. The writing was on the wall, and in June, the company filed for bankruptcy. As a result, 24,000 machines were unceremoniously abandoned, leaving the individual retailers responsible for the costly removal process.
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For some, this marked an unexpected new era for the Redbox machines—if not the company itself. This fall, self-identified “tinkerers” began to discover that, if you asked store managers nicely, you could take a Redbox home for yourself, free of charge. In the case of the retailers who’d filed suits against Redbox, they’d already lost thousands of dollars at the hands of the company, never mind the additional cost of getting rid of the machines. “It’s such a typical hacker reuse project, when you’ve got a kind of a dumb machine, an older machine, but there’s a lot of them, and they can be gotten inexpensively,” David Sutherland of Lindale, Texas, who now owns several, tells AD. Even if these Redbox machines are technically free, getting the 890-pound hunk of metal into your home requires quite a bit of physical effort (not to mention space), but these tech aficionados see many unexpected possibilities for these pieces of media history. (For slightly less effort than what may be required for a Dollar General or Walmart extraction, you might be able to buy one off of a scrap seller.)
Currently, these Redbox enthusiasts are making progress on reverse-engineering the machine’s software, attempting to make the screen serve as a tool to select items from their personal DVD or video game collections, or to adapt the machines for other desired uses. It’s a significant amount of work, and they’ve been using a distinct Discord server called “Redbox Tinkering” to discuss problems and share solutions. According to Steve Dogiakos, a Redbox owner in Montana, they’ve so far figured out how to “make the user interface more user- and tinkerer-friendly,” suiting it more to personal use instead of commercial use. “I’ve mostly been documenting the hardware and software details of my kiosk and adding insights from others in the Discord server to the Redbox.wiki,” Dogiakos explains. “I’m definitely tech-oriented, but the people doing this reverse engineering are real wizards in this story!”
Of the five people I spoke with who own a Redbox, none had a particularly meaningful connection to Redbox as a rental service. Still, for many, the machines offer the potential to one day house their existing physical media collections in a more meaningful way. Jimmy from Georgia had never used a Redbox to rent movies himself, but when he found out about the opportunity to get one, he enlisted a friend to drive three hours away from his town to pick one up. “Hopefully, in the future, when they figure out an easy method, I might swap out half the movies for video games,” says Jimmy, who preferred to not share his surname. “Maybe, one day, I can program it to put some of my favorite childhood TV shows in the machine.” Similarly, Jacob of North Carolina (who also preferred to be identified only by his first name) hopes to store his DVD collection—which was already substantial but has doubled with the stock that was in the machine when he acquired it—in his Redbox.
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Loki in Minnesota was primarily attracted to the challenge of the computing project, but now that he has one of the machines, he’s grown fond of it. “It makes a nice conversation starter in the living room for sure,” Loki says. Especially for people who already have large DVD collections, the Redboxes provide an opportunity to present one’s collection in a way that’s distinct, and, hopefully, once the technology has progressed, more convenient than typical shelving storage. Dogiakos is keeping his Redbox in his garage at present—and notes his thankfulness that his “wife is very patient, so it’s indoors for now, while I tinker with the kiosk hardware and software.”
Still, Sutherland is envisioning the many possibilities with these machines, now that they’re unencumbered by the need to generate revenue. Living in rural Texas, he pictures his machines being used as the movie version of “little free libraries” that can bring neighbors together, even in subtle ways. “I really like the idea of repurposing the tech. Movies can be so alienating, so isolating, but they can also be community-building, especially when you share an experience together…” Sutherland says. “[I like] the idea of putting a kiosk on my front porch and making that sort of a meeting place.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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