Redbox has announced that it will add video game rentals to an additional 5,000 kiosks starting August 1st. The company announced last month that game titles for the Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Wii would be added to 16,000 more redbox kiosks by the end of June, and the total after this next round of additions will approach 27,000.

Redbox owns and operates about 33,000 rental kiosks around the country, and the company did not indicate if or when video games might be added to the remaining 6,000 kiosks that will not have them. All games carried in redbox kiosks are $2 per night.

We all love to save money and here’s a great new way to save on textbooks. Students can already save a few bucks by getting a digital version of a textbook over a hardcover, and they can now save even more thanks to Amazon.

The company has announced textbook rentals for Kindle, which will let students save “up to 80 percent” off the list price of textbooks. That discount varies depending on the rental period, which can be anywhere from 30 to 360 days. The option is already available on “tens of thousands” of textbooks from several publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. Your annotations will even be saved after the rental has expired, and will be accessible at any time on the Kindle website.

Redbox has announced today that it will expand to videogames and offer videogames nationwide starting June 17th. The game rentals will be $2 a day and include titles for PS3, Xbox 360 and the Wii. So they have your gaming rentals covered.

The company has been testing the service at about 5,000 locations for some time now and that will be expanded to 21,000+ other locations now. Not a bad price to try before you buy and anyway some of these games are so short, you can complete them in an evening, so it’s a good deal.

Poor Blockbuster will try anything to keep up with Netflix. With movie studios keeping new release DVDs and Blu-ray discs out of instant rentals for 28 days after release, Blockbuster has come up with a way to hopefully bolster DVD/BD sales.

Some studios have relaxed those terms a bit as the DVDs for Warner Bros’ Inception and 20th Century Fox’s Knight and Day are being offered by NCR’s Blockbuster Express kiosks, rented for a $2.99/night rate. Will it pay off?

Vudu just has started an aggressive campaign to corner the movie rental space through its pricing strategy – lowering the price to below average. What this means to you is just $2 for around 4,000 “top films” in the company’s Movies On Sale section, where you have 48 hours to finish watching once playback begins.

The deal is good until the end of 2010. Lower prices should apply both to those who still use a Vudu Box as well as the TVs and Blu-ray players that have streaming support, like those from LG, Samsung and Vizio.

You can find all kinds of stupid pet tricks and stupid human tricks on YouTube, but no pay-per-view content like Apple, Amazon, and others. Well, the Financial Times is reporting that parent company Google has been in talks with “Hollywood’s leading movie studios” for several months regarding the launch of an international pay-per-view service by the end of this year.

Looks like it would cost about $5 for new titles (streaming, not download) that would be available the same time as the DVD releases. The site has been doing rentals on a trial basis since early this year, with a handful of indie titles.

There had been previous rumors, but now a new source claims that Apple is deeper into negotiations with Fox’s parent company News Corp., as well as “other media companies”, regarding deals for the plan, which would give one or two days of viewing at half the price of a purchase. CBS and Disney are also considering it.

The rumors around iTV persist as well. It would cost just $.99 and have a “smaller hard drive,” a flash drive, and would rely more heavily on streaming than locally stored media. Some other detailed rumors have said that it would still stop at 720p, but that it would run a variant of iOS and could have an app platform.

Blockbuster is still trying hard to catch up with other services despite lagging far behind. Their latest trick? If you’re receiving your Blockbuster movies by snail mail you’ll soon be able to open your mailbox and find Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii games as well.

As usual for Blockbuster this is too little, too late. But if you are interested and have a Blockbuster account, go for it.

After experimenting with movie rentals in January, YouTube has added a bunch of movies and TV episodes that you may actually want to see. However there’s still nothing very mainstream in the YouTube store. It’s mostly indie films, Bollywood and documentaries, which are viewable for 48 hours after renting.

They cost between 99 cents and $4, with payments made via Google Check-Out. YouTube will need to strike some deals with movie studios to get some decent stuff on the site. Stuff with explosions should do the trick.

YouTube has announced that it will offer video rentals through its site. They will be offering the rentals in sync with the Sundance Film Festival and they plan to rent movies from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance festivals as well as “other U.S. partners.”

The festival films will be available through January 31st, while other movies and videos should be available soon after. The expansion into rentals is part of a strategy to get away from ad-only revenue and is said to give content providers much more control over how video content is shown. Providers signed up to the YouTube system will have the option of setting the price, rental period and where it can be found.

If you’re a fan of Redbox and have been hoping for some video game rentals kiosks, then you will love this news. It’s happening. For $2 a night, you can rent games for Nintendo DS, Wii, PS2 and 3, and Xbox 360. That’s not a super awesome price compared to Blockbuster, but it’s not bad.

Right now the game selections are slim, but that should improve quickly, so no worries. At the moment it’s only in the Reno, Nevada area. But like their selection of games it should expand in no time.

This should make a lot of people happy. After a bit of a wait, I present the first Netflix set-top-box. Previously, Instant Viewing was available only to Windows PC users through the IE browser. But now, thanks to Roku, users can finally tap into at least a chunk of the Netflix library without having to wait for those damn discs in your mailbox for just $99.99.

The Netflix Player can even use a wireless signal to stream, but performance may differ here and there. It’s got HDMI, component, composite, Ethernet, S-Video and a Toslink optical audio jack as far as ports go. No HD support, but things look quite positive so far.