Use coupon code GW91TB1 during the checkout process to score the deal. Use this online search tool to find a kiosk near you. Better hurry though, the deal ends on December 8, 2009. [via Dealnews]

It seems the bulk of the kiosks will be at Duane Reade drugstores, but other locations like Gristedes grocery stores will have them as well.

Is this Blockbuster’s last gasp at staying relevant? Who knows, but at least it shows that the company is willing to evolve and forgo the traditional brick and mortar video rental business model. Thankfully this plan is a little more grounded than Blockbusters last two ventures: Blockbuster OnDemand & SD card movie rentals.

SD cards are everywhere, indeed, but there are precious few DVD players, TVs, and personal media players that support them. Your computer has an SD card reader, or else you’ve bought one by now, but I don’t think people want to rent things to play them on their computers if they can stream them so incredibly easily. Sure, working out how to get an SD card’s content onto your TV may be easy for tech-oriented people like you and me, but for the people grabbing a movie on the way out of the grocery store… not so much.

With luck, Blockbuster will wise up and allow a USB drive to be plugged in. I mean, why didn’t they do that first thing? Everybody has those sitting around. And not that many people have high-capacity SD cards. If the movies are over 2GB, a lot of people are sunk because they only have the card that came with their camera (likely 512MB or thereabouts). Oh well, it’s a step in the right direction. Although I guarantee you’ll see a Blockbuster DRM-stripping app out there within a few weeks of these hitting the street.

Redbox, the company that runs the dollar-per-day DVD rental kiosks at grocery stores around the country, is apparently going to start renting Blu-Ray discs.  According to TVPredictions the Blu-Ray discs will be $1, too!

The convenience and low price could appeal to Blu-ray enthusiasts who have struggled to obtain new Blu-ray releases from online DVD rental service Netflix. Blockbuster has started carrying Blu-ray discs in many of its stores, but supplies can sometimes be limited and the rental cost is approximately $4.

No word yet on whether the Redbox Promo Codes will work on Blu-Ray titles.

Dell is apparently getting ready to offer a Qflix-compatible DVD burner as a $120 add-on to some of its computer packages. The technology works by burning DVDs with CSS copy protection so that they’re “functionally identical to standard retail DVDs,” according to the Qflix web site. The system is in use for many of those DVD-burning kiosks we’ve been hearing about. The drive will allow you to burn movies that have been downloaded from the CinemaNow movie service for playback in a standard DVD player. If it sounds dumb, it’s not – especially for “normal” people.

For instance, ask your parents to get a movie they’ve downloaded to play on their TV somehow. This drive ought to make things a bit easier. Wait, no. Ask your parents if they know what Qflix means and if they know how to download a movie to their computer. On second thought, Dell’s either going to have to upsell this drive like crazy or hope that there’s a segment of people smart enough to download movies and work a DVD burner but too dumb to know how what the word “torrent” means.

[via Ubergizmo]

I’m not quite sold on this idea but I thought I’d see what everyone else thinks. There’s a company in Ireland called PortoMedia that’s developed movie kiosks.

These kiosks will be found in four unknown US test cities in the near future (please let me know if you see one) and they’ll hold approximately 350 to 5,000 movies, each of which can be downloaded to a memory card in under a minute. You can watch the movies on a $60 TV box that you buy from PortoMedia (it comes with six free movies) or you can watch them on your PC and/or transfer them to a portable device like an iPod.

The whole idea is that, according to the company, movies take too long to download over the internet. This method would also supposedly cut the costs associated with packaging and shipping DVDs. You could also either rent or buy the movies and these kiosks could be seen everywhere from movie rental places (so they can offer thousands and thousands of movies) to convenience stores.

I’m not entirely sold on the system for the following reasons.

1. You still have to go somewhere to get the movies. The time it takes to go to the nearest store could very easily take longer than it would to download an entire movie over the internet, although what Nicholas just posted might prove that there is such a market for this kind of system.

2. You have to buy proprietary equipment that serves no other purpose than to watch these movies. Why not buy AppleTV, SanDisk’s Take TV, or something similar?

3. I could see this working for people who don’t have high-speed internet access at home but are the kinds of people who don’t have high-speed internet the same people who are gonna be savvy enough to rent or buy memory-card movies from a machine? They’ll likely be the same people who still go to the store and rent movies the old fashioned way.

Would any of you guys use this system or can you think of a market where this would work? I guess I’m just wondering who PortoMedia is targeting here.

Coming soon: Movies on flash memory cards [CNET]

Your first stop for a quiet Friday night at home might soon be the drugstore, not the video store. Actually, that’s assuming you haven’t discovered the joys of On-Demand and/or downloading movies directly to your Media Center PC or Apple TV.

Walgreens is planning to outfit its stores with DVD-burning kiosks “in the next few months,” according to a company spokesperson. This is thanks to last month’s ruling by the DVD Copy Control Association to loosen the reigns on how CSS protection can be used.

The kiosk software, called Qflix, will be licensed from a company called Sonic Solutions and will require the use of special burners and blank discs — how convenient for Sonic Solutions!

Blockbuster is considering a similar move, but is waiting to see how successful Walgreens’ system turns out to be, according to Blockbuster’s Randy Hargrove.

“We’ll continue to monitor it. If it makes sense to get into kiosks, it’s clearly something we could do.”

This could turn out to be bad news for those of you who work at a movie rental store. Blockbuster could conceivably turn every location into a giant kiosk, save a bundle on labor costs, and have every movie in stock all the time.

Of course, that’s assuming this system could be used for movie rentals as well. Does anyone remember Circuit City’s ill-fated DIVX format? I’d imagine we might see something quite similar in the near future if companies like Sonic Solutions can figure out how to make these special blank DVDs self destruct in standard DVD players.

Walgreen sees movie-burning DVD kiosks at stores [Reuters]

A few years ago, music kiosks seemed poised to take over the retail CD sales world at places like Wal-Mart by letting you create and burn your own mix CD from a limited selection of tracks. This already seems hopelessly out of date. MOD’s kiosks give you access to a far wider selection of tracks, thanks to their deals with four of the Big Five labels announced at CES 2007, as well as support for WM DRM (PlaysForSure). More important, they let you download tunes to portable devices over the air.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the number of portable music players with wireless capabilities is growing fast–SanDisk, Microsoft, and Archos are all in the game already, and Apple won’t be far behind. (iPhone, feh… Phones suck. I want a WiFi iPod.) Even Sony Ericsson is jumping into the game with its own kiosks that will deliver music wirelessly from its M-BUZZ service.

As CD sales backslide, eventually we could come to a point where majors will eliminate the overhead of producing physical media by ceasing production of CDs. But wait, you say–the majors still release vinyl, so they’ll never stop producing CDs. Not true. Vinyl offers something CDs don’t: different sound quality. Most vinyl enthusiasts call the sound better, though many modern listeners prefer their music free of pops and scratches. The simple fact is that there will always be people who agree with musician/engineer/journalist Steve Albini, who in the 1980’s wrote “The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

So what will a modern big-chain music store look like in the year 2017? (Assuming, of course, that the planet hasn’t been destroyed by then.) Aside from the obvious “vintage” section over in a dark corner somewhere, with a handful of physical CDs and the lingering remains of vinyl, I think it’ll look much like the stores of today. But the stores will use their space much differently, with more of it devoted to advertising and movies.

The racks will still be there, but they’ll contain jewelbox-size digital picture frames with the album art and other info. Purchasing music–including digital versions of the artwork and liner notes–will be done wirelessly for those with wireless-enabled players or phones, which will likely be well more than half the people out there. Content will be served up by in-store wireless systems whose throughput speeds will make 802.11n devices seem like dial-up.

What about those who still don’t have a wireless player? Flash memory will be cheap enough by then that stores will be able to sell 1GB players at the door for the equivalent of $5 today. The have-nots will use self-serve kiosks to download content to their players. Want fries artwork with that? No problem, just print out the booklet from the kiosk. It’ll be a bit like going through a toll booth–some people will fly through using EZ-Pass, while others will have to wait in line.

The future of mom-and-pop shops–like Amoeba Music in San Francisco and Academy Records in New York City–is ensured by people like Steve Albini and the thousands of vinyl collectors out there. But CDs and DVDs are very different from vinyl in that they are simply holders of digital files. And make no mistake about it: They’re on their way out, while the high-tech record shop is looming ever closer.

(This week’s illustrations were created by Leah Perrotta, a Brooklyn-based artist and all-around lovely gal. Check out more of her illustration work here.)

QFlix assuages the studios’ piracy concerns by letting you burn content to secure CSS (content scrambling system)-encrypted DVD media, creating a disc that’s playable in set-top DVD players and computer drives, but that can’t be duplicated. However, for consumers to take advantage of it, you’ll need to be “enabled.”

QFlix system will lock DVDs [variety]