Food retailers have often tried to incorporate kiosks of various kinds into their store footprints, only to find them bypassed by shoppers. But movie-rental DVD kiosks appear to have captured the attention of shoppers in many stores across the United States.

The kiosk segment will grow from 1% in 2006 to an expected 17% in 2013.

In supermarkets and other retail stores, the lure of $1 nightly video rentals — by far the least expensive rental option available — coupled with the convenience of picking up and returning DVDs to frequently visited destinations, has made the touchscreen DVD kiosk an attractive medium and revived video rentals in non-specialty video outlets.

While still a relatively small percentage of spending on video rentals — projected to be 13% in 2010 by the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) — the kiosk segment has grown from just 1% in 2006, and is expected to reach 17% in 2013. By contrast, traditional in-store rentals, which represented 79% of sales in 2006, are predicted to fall to 45% in 2013, said EMA.

“Most supermarkets have converted from live rental departments to kiosks,” said Bill Bryant, vice president of sales, Ingram Entertainment, La Vergne, Tenn., a distributor of DVD software. Just a handful of regional chains, including Coburn's, St. Cloud, Minn., and K-VA-T Food Stores, Abingdon, Va., still run video rental departments, said Bryant, adding that Safeway operates video departments in its Seattle division but kiosks elsewhere.

Bryant said there is still room for kiosks in more supermarkets, though “the rapid expansion was completed by 2009.” Moreover, he sees rental kiosks as a sustainable format. “Consumers have adjusted to them and retailers are comfortable with them,” he said.

The leading provider of DVD kiosks as well as the pioneer of the category is Redbox, Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., a division of Coinstar, which has its kiosk in more than 20,000 U.S. retail locations, including about 2,000 locations with more than one kiosk, the company said. (Meanwhile, Coinstar coin-counting machines are used by 149 supermarket companies.) Redbox is testing Blu-ray rentals in select locations and plans to expand Blu-ray availability later this year, the company said.

Each Redbox kiosk holds 630 DVDs, including up to 200 new releases, and consumers can reserve them online or with an iPhone. The DVDs are labeled with bar codes, which require them to face a certain direction when inserted into the kiosk upon return.

Food retailers offering Redbox include Kroger, Wal-Mart Stores, Giant Eagle, Food Lion, Stop & Shop and Albertsons LLC; other retail outlets with Redbox include Walgreens, 7-Eleven and McDonald's, which featured the first Redbox kiosks in 2004.

Following Redbox, the next largest DVD kiosk vendor is POS and ATM provider NCR, Duluth, Ga., which provides Blockbuster Express-branded kiosks under a licensing agreement struck with video rental chain Blockbuster in 2008.

Augmenting its business with the acquisitions of DVDPlay and The New Release kiosk programs last year, NCR now has 5,000 DVD kiosks (typically one per store) in such supermarkets as Publix, Safeway, Big Y and Basha's, as well as in convenience store chains Tedeschi Food Shops and Sheetz, the company said. One-quarter of the kiosks are outdoors.

NCR expects to have 7,000 kiosks in stores by the end of June, and is targeting 10,000 placements by the end of the year, said Alex Camara, vice president and general manager, NCR Entertainment. It is testing Blu-ray at 50 sites, he added.