Marshall and the Movies

Redbox, Netflix, or Blockbuster?

This is the general holy trinity of movie disc rental options nowadays in the market, but could we perhaps be looking at a new competitor?  Here comes “Flix on Stix,” a kiosk service that downloads movies onto a USB disk.  Sounds genius, doesn’t it?  You don’t have to worry about running out of a movie (cough all other disc-providing rental services), and it doesn’t require a massive kiosk for disc inventory.

Here are some of the nuts and bolts of the service according to Cinematical:

“… the company promises to offer movies that you can download onto your personal USB or SD device, with prices ranging from $1 (for three days) to $4 (for 12 days). After the time period expires, the movie self-destructs, though not, alas, with a tiny puff of smoke, a la ‘Mission: Impossible.'”

So no worries on late fees and no hassle to return the movie.  Beautiful!  The two issues, as the article points out, are that a lot of people don’t travel casually with a USB stick and that a lot of televisions don’t have a video input for USB media.  Perhaps it just becomes for laptop users, but then it has to compete with the juggernaut of iTunes.

I carry around a USB stick with me most of the time (thanks to still being a student), so I’d find the service very useful, much better than going to a Redbox queue with their rigid deadlines and $1-a-night penalties.  What do you think – would you choose Flix on Stix?