Redbox Instant tipped to exit beta in March

If you are excited at the thought of another streaming video service available to battle against Netflix and Hulu, you may already be familiar with the beta for Redbox Instant. Redbox is the kiosk DVD rental service that you can find just about every Walmart location in the country and a lot of other places as well. Redbox Instant began rolling out in late December of 2012 as a beta offering.

Reports are now surfacing that Redbox Instant will be fully available to the public before the end of Q1. The tip came from the CEO of this fledgling streaming company at CES 2013. The official public launch has been pegged to happen in March.

While Redbox Instant won't have a streaming catalog that competes in size with Netflix, it will have something that the other streaming video services don't offer. Redbox runs over 42,000 kiosks across the United States where people will be able to drop in and rent physical movies as part of their monthly streaming membership. That means Redbox Instant users will have access to brand-new films.

Redbox Instant CEO Shawn Strickland said that the service has 7500 "streaming and transactional movie titles" in its library today. The service has a library of 4500 films available at any time using the subscription and Strickland promises the services adding more titles every day. Strickland also noted that the streaming service will focus on movies only for now but the doors open for adding TV content later.

[via VentureBeat]