News

Minneapolis airport deploys movie kiosks

March 12, 2012

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is offering relief for bored travelers with Digibookiosks that sell and rent movies, according to a news story at twincities.com.

To use the service, the customer simply plugs a USB flash drive into the kiosk, selects a movie, pays, and downloads the movie to the flash drive, which can then be plugged into a Windows-based PC for viewing.

Initially, Santa Monica, Calif.-based Digiboo is installing about a dozen of the bright-orange movie kiosks throughout Terminal 1 in Minneapolis. Airports in Oregon and Washington State will follow.

The Digiboo kiosks will offer more than 600 titles from Paramount, Lionsgate, Warn and Sony Pictures. Future releases from participating studios will be added upon their DVD release. Movie rentals cost about $3 to $4; purchases run about $15.

Rentals are good for 30 days and must be finished within 48 hours of play. Film purchases are watchable until the thumb drive is reformatted. Movies require about two gigabytes of drive space.

One downside of the service is that picture quality is sacrificed somewhat by the requirement for fast downloading. Another weakness of the service: it can only be used with the Windows operating system. Support for Android devices is in the works, Digiboo said, but Apple compatibility is farther off.

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