Redbox launches iPhone application
DIGITAL: Download unveiled eight months after Redbox nixed earlier version
By Danny King -- Video Business, 11/23/2009
NOV. 23 | DIGITAL: Redbox last week unveiled its first application for Apple iPhone users eight months after having a third-party version removed from the Apple online store. Another application designed to publish rental codes people can use for free DVD rentals also was made available today.
The largest U.S. movie-rental kiosk operator on Nov. 18 launched its free application, linktoapp.com/Redbox which lets users find the nearest kiosk and reserve titles from certain locations. More than half the people who rated the new application on the iTunes Web site gave it a perfect five-star rating.
Redbox is looking to serve a North American user base of so-called “smartphones”—which include Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Palm’s Pre—that is expected to jump to about 240 million people in 2013 from about 60 million last year, research firm Parks Associates said in June.
As a result of such growth, American spending on mobile applications will jump more than twelvefold from $343 million this year to $4.2 billion in 2013, when about a quarter of mobile applications will be paid, with an average price of $2.37, Yankee Group said in September.
Still, unlike Netflix, which in May launched a section on its Web site dedicated specifically for applications and now has dozens of them, Redbox has taken a more conservative approach. The Coinstar unit in March asked Apple to remove an iPhone application developed by a third party.
Meanwhile, Phoenix-based Neese Products today released a 99¢ iPhone application that publishes Redbox rental codes that can be used to get free DVD rentals. Because of Redbox’s $1 a night rentals at almost all of its more than 20,000 machines, the application pays for itself after just one successful use, Neese said in a statement today.
