Blockbuster Renting Movies Via SD Cards

Its a decent idea Blockbuster, but you're pretty much done for.

DRM is a deal breaker plain and simple.

will be interesting to see what happens and who else pinches their style.

Blockbuster is far from being considered by many to be "fledgling". They've been around a lot longer than Netflix or Redbox.

It's a unique idea but I don't see it doing very well for a couple reasons.
1) People are wanting to go out less and less, especially just to pick up a movie. More and more people are turning to streaming media as their source of entertainment.
2) SD cards. The majority of people are tech illiterate, they are not going to know what a SD card is, much less what to do with it.

And yeah, about that DRM...

Yeahh. I hate blockbuster. Those @s$holes cut my credit card because it expired and cancelled my account. I am glad they are going under.

Why not offer a refund of some amount for returned SD cards? I would have no use for 25 SD cards, after renting 25 different movies.

Interesting idea. I would choose it as opposed to dvds or blu-ray rentals (provided they have HD movies).
What does the DRM matter if it's a rental and all it does it prevent you from viewing the file after a certain amount of time?

@ bobdole: usually when credit cards expire they tend to get cut off.

Yes, if the quality is decent, I can see this as potentially a nice cost saving measure for all involved.

Using SD cards is completely worthless. Look how many of these things will end up in the trash after it's been viewed. Better business model is stream the videos to the customers which is something others been doing for awhile. Ya well DRM is a deal breaker for some but there have to be some kind of control over their content otherwise nobody would be making any money.

uhh, dont people rent movies to watch on their tv? i don't know a tv, blue ray player, dvd player that has a SD slot
otherwise there's lots of free things to watch online, i don't see this going very far.

and i agree there should be a refund for returned cards.

why don't they just have a multi-card reader/wrier and people bring along their own card/USB stick and download the movie/s they want to watch? Similar to the photo-printing booths by the likes of Kodak.

Originally when I read this story thats what I thought they where doing...
A kiosk with a DVD burner and multiple slots so you could just put the movies on what ever media you have laying around, hmmm of course this is kind of what my computer does now and if I wanted to for free... Of course who has time for movies these days.

I don't see why with a rental. At least you KNOW you're renting it.

I would hope they will allow the reuse of the SD chips or bring your own and load it on there. Multiple media types would be nice, like USB too. If they really want to get this out there, they can figure a way to play these on game systems too.

The other place this will have an advantage over Redbox/netflix is at airports. No worries if your destination has a kiosk waiting for you, just buy and go. Can't stream on aircraft (yet) and its cheaper than the $5 to buy headphones for a movie you don't really want to watch anyway.

DRM means you will need a special STB to play the video, which means a lot of money on a device that may become dropped by the company in a year and become just like those $500 HD DVD players only more useless.

Haven't seen anything to indicate that, either here or in the Fast Company article.

I was hesitant to use Netflix, after renting from Family Video and Blockbuster the traditional way, but now having tried Netflix, I am very happy. I hope that Netflix can get more movies onto streaming as well, as it's pretty convenient to just turn on my netflix player and watch a movie. I don't think I will be going back to Blockbuster again since the rental fee for one movie is half of my monthly subscription to Netflix. Movies on SD card is a novel idea, but I think it's doomed.

Even if you do have to use something capable of their specific DRM there's surely to be an app for that for PC. And that means I'm covered in any number of situations. In my room? on my desktop. On the big screen? HTPC time. On the go? On my laptop. Like for the airplane example every recent-ish laptop I have seen has a native SD-card slot.

I'm certain that I'm not the only one who already has a setup like that which is nearly 100% flexible as far as usage goes. Also, unlike redbox, you only need to retrieve it, you don't need to bother getting back to it within the day.

One last thing, I think that at that price, it is too low for them to be able to afford at least an 8 gigabyte SD card per every single movie. Almost certainly, the $2 price is simply for the rental. Bring your own SD card, or we'll sell one big enough to you for a "low" one-time fee. After all, they said 'to give higher resolution' this means AT LEAST higher than standard def. So it has to have enough space to hold that. It'll also most likely be encoded in something like h.264 in order to make the most out of the space they do have, or barring that xvid. Any lower than that would make the SD cards way up there. If it is h.264, wave goodbye to any netbooks abilities to do it. (I admit I haven't actually tried to run that on one, but I suppose I should at some point)

Blu-Ray is 25GB or 50GB. I doubt they will be giving away 32GB SD cards. So the bitrate will be lower, and so will the quality I think. So why not just allow people to download the movies? That's a lot quicker than waiting for a card or disc to arrive via snail-mail...

700MB rips are the way to go. =D
No USB, no SD, no piles of discs, no expensive as hell Bluray.

Atleast they're trying.
Now, will you die already blockbuster? I hate you.

So, if I plug the SD card into my PC and rip it I can continue to make BB offsite backups for them, eh?

With netbook sales expected to top $35 million this year and grow to an estimated $139 million in 2013, there will be a huge market for this. It's kind of forward thinking on Blockbuster's part, I mean they have to do something after getting schooled by Netflix.

I just quit my job at Blockbuster a little over three weeks ago. As with all their other ideas, this one is either too far ahead of it's time or too little too late.

Digital versions of movies, bought from the studios like this or like OnDemand from your Cable/Satellite/IPTV provider, cost the providers next to nothing (a few cents) so the sale of a rental for it is almost pure profit. The cost of DVDs was in the disc, artwork and box (a few dollars) and they got beat up pretty bad after being rented by only a few people. Blockbuster could POTENTIALLY make a fortune.

The idea will be to get a 16gb MicroSD card or larger if/when you can with a SD adapter so you can play the movie on your phone if you have a MicroSD slot on it. There's Blockbuster's set top box, which I'm sure they're making almost pure profit on, and there's also some DVD/BD players with SD/MicroSD slots or USB slots so you can put said MicroSD card on it and it's adapted to the USB for fileshare. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense and could work.

The TRUE problem is that in-store rentals are dying. No one wants to drive to the video store and waste their gas and most video stores nowadays, at least the ones remaining open, feel out-of-the-way... not to mention the customer service is generally HORRIBLE (remember, I used to work at one, I KNOW how it gets). OnDemand and Netflix (especially with it's recent xbox360 and Playstation 3 HD streaming plans that are incredibly CHEAP for unlimited streaming) are the way to go. I also heard Netflix is also working with Apple and AT&T to stream movies directly to your iPhone. So long as we don't have bandwidth caps on our internet service, digital streams are the way to go.

This is a absolutely fantastic idea, but what keeps redbox from doing the same thing. They already have deals with walmart and mcdonalds. Eventually netflix will prove to be right with their downloadable or streaming movie concept. But you need a really good internet connection for HD movies, like fios or something.

It would make more sense for you to provide your own SDHC card, pop it in their machine and have the movie data copied to it. You could get HD quality video that way and Blockbuster doesn't have to spend the dough on a bunch of flash media. If you don't already have your own card, you could purchase one from the machine on your first rental and then just re-use it for your future ones.

Sir, almost all newer TVs and DVD and BluRay players have SD slots. I don't even watch DVDs anymore, I just watch movies off the SD card or over my home network. Are you living under a rock? Optical media is on the way out...SD cards are the future, there's no question. Their durability, size re-writable functionality and speed make them far superior to round discs.

Dangit, I quoted the wrong person. Soryy about that.

Some one needs to make a set top box thats pretty much a PC... optical media drive, hard drive, and a nice 10 slot card reader.
The reason for this is that they could support what ever compression is the best at the time like H264... the HD could be used to store movies or used as a DVR. Then this rental scheme might work out better and with the right compression you can get HD video at around 2GB's. Maybe Block Buster should just rent or sell these units... then they could tie in the DRM to the hardware itself (of course it would be cracked eventually but it could be updated the same as BluRay)

I love this idea! I love my Blu-ray movies, but my laptop just can't play em, so having the ability to stick them on a card and pop em in is just awesome! It makes Blu-ray movies PORTABLE for me