Last Saturday, Jan. 18, five students from the Honors program at Oklahoma Christian University finally obtained a Redbox kiosk, fulfilling a quest four months in the making.
As covered in a previous article, all Redbox kiosks across the United States were left abandoned in July 2024 when Chicken Soup for the Soul filed for Chapter 7 liquidation. A group of Honors students at Oklahoma Christian University undertook a quest to obtain one of their own.
In the fall 2024 semester, Seth Peace, the electrical engineering student leading the project, received an offer from a fellow Redbox hunter. The man cut a wonderful deal for Peace: $200 for a functioning kiosk, discs included.
Peace and four of his friends made a trip to Wichita, Kansas on Jan. 18th to complete the exchange. Sophomore gaming and animation major Clay Aelasi volunteered to drive the group.
“We used my truck to go and get the Redbox. It was a five-ish hour trip with five people in the vehicle. It was kind of quiet. People slept on the way.”
The crew drove through lightly snowed Kansas backroads to make the transaction at an outdoor storage rental. Most of the students were under-dressed for the cold weather, so the encounter included several trips to the car for warming up (the National Weather Service reported an average temperature of 25 degrees Fahrenheit that day).
“We pulled up and he let us into the storage garage,” Peace recounted. “He said he had six machines and we could pick which one we wanted, describing the different models he had. We chose one we liked and tried plugging it in.”

After 10 minutes of waiting in the car, the students checked on the kiosk to find it was stuck with an error on the screen. The machine refused to acknowledge the hard drive and would not boot past the BIOS.
“It couldn’t get past the BIOS, but it was freezing cold so we decided that we would repair it when we got back to OC.”
Peace explained why he chose the kiosk that he did.
“It had a very nice vinyl on the top, completely untarnished, that said, ‘rent movies straight from the theater.’ Obviously, it’s a bit of an outdated message given that they have not received disk updates in one or two years, but it was still a very nice vinyl. It also had all of the internal components intact, including the modem, PC, and disk selector.”
When the students arrived back at Oklahoma Christian, they had one more trip to make before installing the Redbox at their dorm.
“We got a quick meal from the caf, then went to Harbor Freight to get a dolly to get the Redbox into Davisson’s backyard,” Aelasi said. “It was a collective effort involving several people straining their muscles because the machine was very heavy.”
The kiosk is currently stationed in the gated porch behind Davisson Hall.

“We still haven’t gotten it fully functioning yet. We need a few more components to make that happen, but hopefully it will happen in the near future,” Peace said. “We have taken out some of the pieces: mainly the motherboard and all of its collective components. Interestingly enough, it appears to be a full mini PC in there, complete with Windows 7 license key. We have been experimenting with that, trying to get it to recognize the internal hard drive, but it seems like it might have given out, so we need to replace it with a solid state drive.”
The students plan to experiment with it further, “seeing what the limits of the software are and how hackable it is,” as Peace said. They also intend to use it for movie storage to facilitate movie nights.
Peace corresponded with the Housing Department at Oklahoma Christian prior to the trip and obtained permission to store the kiosk on-campus. Their current agreement with housing is on a semester by semester basis, so the Redbox hunters hope it is here to stay.
“I talked to our RD, Emily, and she said to contact housing, so I emailed them. They emailed back with a couple of questions about how we were going to take care of the machine and keep it functional. I replied back, and they said that we would have approval for this semester, pending approval for next semester.”
Peace and his fellow Davisson Hall Redbox connoisseurs are thrilled to have a rental machine of their own, but its acquisition only marks the beginning of their journey into exploring its inner workings.
“I’m most excited to see how a professional electrical device works. As an electrical engineering major, it is interesting to me how professionals do their work. I’m just really excited to see how this piece of machinery was put together.”
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