Redbox Fails To Pay $4 Million To NBCUniversal As It Fires Its Board

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cord Cutters News: Earlier this week, Chicken Soup For The Soul, the parent company behind Redbox, Crackel, and the streaming service by the same name, announced that the entire board of directors and board of managers of each subsidiary of the Company other than William J. Rouhana, Jr., have been fired. This comes as a holder of more than 75% of the voting power of the company used his stock holdings to lay off the Company's board of directors. Now, it has come out that the company missed a $4 million payment to NBCUniversal as a part of its settlement over unpaid royalties. Now it faces a possible order to pay all of $16.7 million it owes NBCUniversal as questions about the future of the company grows. This comes after NBCUniversal sued saying Redbox had not been paying royalties. It agreed to a payment plan but now has missed the first payment of the plan. Recently the company has been hit hard by the decline in ad revenue on its free streaming services and the drop in DVD rentals at its Redbox locations. This has led to the company seeing its revenues drop 75% in the 1st quarter of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023, according to a SEC filing first spotted by NextTV. Chicken Soup For The Soul is in a tough situation after acquiring Redbox in 2022 for $50 million in stock and an assumption of $325 million in debt. Add on top of that a shaky media environment with cratering ad revenue and quarterly losses, and the company's future is very much in the air. In August, CEO William J. Rouhana said that the company was holding a strategic review to evaluate its opportunities, which is business speak for putting itself up for sale. Chicken Soup for The Soul last year announced that it was in active discussions for a potential sale back in October of this year but so far nothing has come from these talks.

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