How to Reserve a DVD movie online at your local RedBox Movie Kiosk

My spouse and I were recently watching a series of movies, mainly streamed from Netflix.   After seeing Ironman 2 and Spy Hard, we thought, hey how about RED; we unanimously agreed and so went to stream it from Netflix.  Alas, it was only available by DVD.   No worries we thought, we’ll just slink on down to the Red Box Movie Kiosk and rent it there for about $1.

And so I did

And then I waited in line to get my movie.  That’s right, I waited outside of a brick-and-morter store, in line, to get a chance to use the Red Box Kiosk. And when I got my turn after 15 minutes Red Box did not have RED.

So, back home and back on the computer and that’s when I found out you can reserve movies at a specific Red Box.

Oh, wait, you don’t know about Red Box?  Well let me back up a minute.  Red Box is a kiosk that rents DVD’s to you for about $1.00   Its your old local VCR Movie rental store now moved from a store to a machine the size of a coke machine.   Fast Company ran an article on Red Box and in it they described how The Red Boxes work:

What’s surprising, though, is how much wizardry goes into making Redbox work. Each machine is connected to the Internet via DSL or a 3G cellular modem. This lets customers browse and reserve movies at their local Redbox through the Web, and return movies they rent from one Redbox to any other. Each machine packs a sophisticated inventory-management system that determines how many copies of different new titles to order based on past performance of similar movies at that location. The kiosks send their inventory orders up to the mother ship every week, and Redbox’s technicians fan out to each kiosk to stock it with new DVDs. “That’s the most interesting part — where technology meets old-fashioned field distribution,” Lowe says.

So back to my quest for the movie RED.    My spouse sat down at our computer and she began to fiddle with the Red Box web site, she:

1. Typed in RED in the Red Box Search box
2. Then, on the Red Box landing page for the movie RED, she noticed a big red button that said, “FIND” so she clicked it
3. Red Box, knowing our location based on our IP address, then pulled up a list of Red Box locations that had our movie
4. Then, my spouse clicked on a big red RENT button, next to the location she wanted me to head off to so I could rent the movie for us.