Miscellaneous News

1. The BAS is looking for a new webmaster. The current webmaster will train you and hand it over to you, and provide support as necessary. The website is written in simple HTML. You will need a computer and a high speed internet connection (you will need to download a 6GB backup in a reasonable amount of time). $300 is the annual payment. You may be asked to support admin of the BAS Facebook pages as well.

2. The BAS is looking for a new president. The past president will assist in the transition. Elections will happen soon.

3.   Bankruptcy Took Redbox. Who Will Take the Machines? --- Company is defunct, sticking merchants with 24,000 DVD-dispensing kiosks

The owner of an Alabama moving company is hired to extract the DVD-dispensing machines that are taking up space and sapping the resources and patience of store owners across the country. The machines, owned by now-defunct Redbox, weigh as much as 890 pounds, can be environmental hazards and sometimes require an electrician to disconnect.

And that might be the easy part.

The next steps are figuring out what to do with the big red machines and all the DVDs that in the era of streaming have been rendered largely obsolete.

Redbox's parent filed for bankruptcy in the summer, saying it lacked the cash to buy the rights to many new releases, and the kiosk operator subsequently went out of business. It left 24,000 movie vending machines still in the field. Some of the nation's biggest retailers were stuck holding the logistical bag.

But a small percentage could be salvaged and find homes, either with collectors looking to preserve a piece of video history or with enterprising sorts with other ideas about how to put the machines to use.

North Carolina resident Jacob Helton, 19, said he got a machine when, by pure luck, a contractor's truck and trailer pulled up at a local drugstore to haul it off. "I struck up a conversation with them and made a deal," he said. Helton said he plans to keep the look of the kiosk's exterior but will repurpose the interior to store his games and discs.

"I wanted a Redbox machine because I felt like Redbox is important in the history of American media," he said. "Its collapse marks the end of the video rental era."

Also in limbo are the movies that never made it inside a machine. DVD maker Vantiva said in a court filing that it is stuck with 386,000 discs that now-defunct Redbox had ordered but never took. Vantiva has looked into selling the films, which include "Karate Dog" and "The 12 Dogs of Christmas," but the best offer it said it has received amounts to little more than a penny apiece.

[I used this service and it worked well.  I noticed that the “DVD extras” such as commentary were not on the Redbox version—DBH]

WSJ Oct 11, 2024