If you haven’t noticed, Redbox movie rental kiosks used to be everywhere, especially at grocery stores and convenience locations. The idea made sense at the time: you were already there, so grabbing a movie on the way out was easy. Today, many of those kiosks have disappeared, replaced by on-demand streaming and app-based rentals that deliver instantly to your phone, TV, or tablet.

Flix-on-Stix was trying to solve a similar problem, but with a twist: instead of renting a disc, the idea was to rent your movie on a USB drive. Conceptually, it still sounds appealing today, especially for situations where internet access is limited, unreliable, or restricted. Think hotels with poor Wi-Fi, long flights, remote job sites, classrooms, or enterprise environments where streaming services are blocked.

But the technical and practical challenges remain. Transfer times are less of an issue today thanks to widespread USB 3.2 support and faster flash media, but file size has gone the opposite direction. A modern 4K movie can easily exceed 40–80GB. That raises new questions: who supplies the media, who pays for wear on the flash drive, and how does the kiosk handle compatibility across devices? Then there is the DRM problem. There is still no universal USB copy protection method that works cleanly across Windows, macOS, smart TVs, game consoles, and set-top boxes. Studios continue to require strict, certified protection systems, and most rely on streaming ecosystems precisely because access control is easier to enforce there. All of this makes the original Flix-on-Stix idea interesting, but still commercially difficult. What do you think?

Source: EverythingUSB