Redbox has the DVD rental kiosk business pretty wrapped up, particularly after it bought out the owner of the remaining Blockbuster Express kiosks. A company called Digiboo hopes to carve out its own niche, however, by leveraging a different medium: USB flash drives.
The rental service, which recently launched kiosks at three airports, allows customers to select a movie or television show for rental or purchase. They then insert a USB storage device, and the file is copied over. The idea itself is not new — a service called Flix on Stix was shown off at CES last year — but Digiboo has already bested that product by actually making it to market.
There’s a definite appeal to the Digiboo concept; airport Wi-Fi can be notoriously hit-or-miss, and waiting for a download before your flight leaves is a race few users will likely win. That said, there are some significant limitations. Digiboo’s movies aren’t available in HD, and due to DRM restrictions the USB drives need to be initially authorized via an Internet connection, removing the connectivity-free, spur-of-the-moment rental benefit. Furthermore, the service is currently Windows-only, though Digiboo does say a Mac announcement is forthcoming (Android support is promised by June of this year). Whether that will be enough to help the company gain any traction against Redbox and online download services, however, remains to be seen.
