2022年8月19日

“我喜歡混亂”:雞湯公司的CEO解釋了他收購Redbox的原因。本周五，我們將深入了解心靈娛樂最近收購Redbox的《雞湯》，並分享一些關於這個周末閱讀、觀看和玩什麼的建議。如果你不關注流媒體大戰的細枝末節，你可能會錯過這樣一條消息:上周，Soul Entertainment旗下的《雞湯》(Chicken soup for the Soul Entertainment)完成了對Redbox的收購。沒錯，這家公司以其勵誌書籍而聞名，但出於某種無法解釋的原因碰巧也在賣狗糧，這家公司的子公司就是這些標誌性紅色DVD亭的新主人。你頭暈了嗎?這正是心靈雞湯娛樂公司CEO比爾·魯哈納所喜歡的。“我喜歡混亂，”魯哈納在本周早些時候和我聊天時說。“這個行業現在完全混亂了，”魯哈納告訴我。“這完全是一場噩夢。它完全處於一種不斷變化的狀態。 I’m pretty comfortable with that.” Rouhana’s company has been on a buying spree for a few years now, strategically acquiring video assets that weren’t able to fully flourish under their previous owners. This includes the ad-supported video pioneer Crackle, which Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment acquired from Sony in 2019 . Other CSSE brands include Popcornflix, Frightpix and Truli. “Each one of these has got its own sort of voice,” Rouhana said. By adding Redbox to the fold, Rouhana is gaining access not only to 36,000 DVD kiosks, but also a sizeable digital rental business, a FAST service with 145 streaming channels and a customer loyalty program with 40 million members — something he wants to use as a marketing vehicle for the company’s other services, as well as a source of insights. “People do have a life outside of Netflix,” Rouhana told me. By learning about the things people are looking for at DVD kiosks, he hopes to gain better insights to fine-tune personalized recommendations. “We’re very interested in data,” he said. And then there’s the actual business of renting DVDs, which is still a thing people do, even in this day and age. If there’s anything for them to actually rent, that is. Not only did the pandemic disrupt film shoots and releases, it also led major media companies to move their finished films directly to streaming, further cutting off Redbox and the rest of the home video market. “The kiosks themselves are about at the low point they're ever going to be at, because it's been two years of no theatrical releases,” Rouhana said. But it’s not like people don’t have any interest in those cheap rentals anymore. Even during the pandemic, Redbox’s kiosks saw the same number of sessions as before, Rouhana said. “People kept coming and looking. They just didn’t have anything to [rent].” That’s changing now, and not just because of an industry-wide recovery. A recent strategy U-turn at Warner Bros. Discovery is also giving Rouhana hope that there will be a lot more movies to rent in the near future. The days of expensive streaming exclusives are over, he argued. “Everybody is going to end up back in a window strategy.” Sure, eventually, people will stop buying or renting DVDs, and Rouhana is prepared to slowly scale down Redbox’s kiosk business, starting with locations that don’t perform well. “But [that’s] a 10- or 20-year time horizon,” he said. “It’s just not tomorrow.” In the meantime, Redbox is also benefiting from its corporate legacy: As a descendent of the Coinstar kiosk empire, the company has been servicing kiosks for Coinstar and ecoATM as well as in-store lockers for Amazon, among others. “That [part of the business] is growing like crazy, making money,” Rouhana said. Redbox’s kiosks are also a good insurance policy against inflation and a possible recession. Rouhana told me that he’s not losing too much sleep about advertisers pulling back from streaming. But if things do get really bad, Redbox may actually see a lot more business. After all, checking out a disc is still a lot cheaper than an online rental. “If there's ever been a place that benefits in an inflationary environment or recession, it's the place you can get the same thing at the same time, for one-third of [the] price,” Rouhana said. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment may also use any possible downturn to snap up a few more assets for its portfolio. “When there's massive disruption, you have people who get hurt,” he said. — Janko Roettgers Sponsored content from DataRobot DataRobot's AI Cloud for Financial Services Unlocks the Art of the Possible: DataRobot continues to attract clients in financial services who want to de-risk their AI investments and rapidly scale AI to almost every part of their operations, resulting in improved productivity and higher customer satisfaction.