[merubin75]

This is how Redbox always plays hardball with the studios; don’t want to negotiate a fair deal for us to stock your movies? Fine, we’ll give our employees credit cards, send them to Best Buy, and have them buy 10 DVDs. Then we’ll have a pizza party, unwrap all the shrinkwrap, and then ship them out to all the field workers who stock the kiosks.

How is this any different, except with digital downloads codes instead of physical discs?

FWIW, I worked at Redbox back in the day as the company’s social media manager. The process I described is exactly what happened when the studio that owned the Twilight movies refused an agreement that would let Redbox stock “Breaking Dawn (Part 1)” earlier than 54 days. Fun times.

Of course, it was all fun until we discovered that we’d sent out disc 2 (special features) instead of disc 1 (the movie) by mistake to about 80% of the kiosks. The Twitter shitstorm from angry suburban moms was ... not fun.