This is a concept that I had in a morning before my day-job when I had spooned a little too much instant coffee into my mug.
As Walmart tried out a $10 a month inclusive 1GB Internet package ( which tapped you onto the Internet anywhere you could get a Sprint tower, without a contract ) I was wondering, well, how in the world could you get the TED Talk education and inspiration out to the world, or at least, most of the United States, but still keep your Internet bill to $10?
As historically, if you look back at Redbox, it was largely tested at McDonald's locations, which are a lot more prevalent than Walmart. (I believe McDonald's was one of the main financial backers of the original Redbox concept.)
So, if you're limited to 1GB of Internet in a month, budget-wise (although you could scale up, but from a psychological standpoint, saying "I can do all this for $10 a month" is really significant) the most efficient way to get TED Talks would be on DVD or Blu-ray, through an efficient delivery channel that did not involved downloading the talk. So, I figured, what if Redbox could pop some TED Talk themed mixes into their distribution system and charge the standard rate?
At the TED and Redbox discretion, you could allow digital copies to be pulled directly from the DVD or Blu-ray onto your local network. The downside of this is being that since a lot of computers now don't have optical disc drives, and tablets often don't have USB ports to hook in an external drive. So we can't please everyone, unless we could translate the disc data into a Wi-fi packet, which I'm sure is solveable by some current technology and if not it could probably be developed in a few weeks to suit the needs.
So, my proposal would be for TED and RED to chat a bit, and toss out some discs into a few test markets. See if people rent them. The person renting that disc might change the world. TED could even offer scholarship codes, where you could get a free night's rental.
Just some thoughts. :) < April 05, 2013 >