• by Wayne Friedman , March 26, 2012

Overall home rentals of DVD and Blu-ray disc continue to drop. But one segment of the business, kiosk rentals, continues to grow.

Rentals in big stores and elsewhere dropped 3.4% to $5.65 billion in 2011. Worse news for the industry: Rentals were down 21.3% in the fourth quarter of 2011, per Rentrak Home Video Essentials report. But fourth-quarter rental business at kiosks grew by 28%.

Rentrak looks at 5,000 stores that rent discs, some 40,000 kiosks, and rentals by mail order subscription, measuring some 65,000 discs and more than 1 billion transactions. The biggest rental movie of 2011 was Summit Entertainment's "Red," which pulled in $90.38 million in box-office receipts. Rentrak did not disclose specific rental revenue numbers.

"Red" beat out bigger wide-screen movies -- Paramount''s "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" pulling in U.S. box office sales of $352.39 million; Warner Bros.'s "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1" saw $295.98 million; Warner Bros's "Inception" $292.58 million and Walt Disney's "Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" hooked $241.07 million.

"People have many choices when it comes to renting videos, for both digital and physical media, so it's interesting to see DVD and Blu-ray Disc rentals are still the No. 1 choice for consumers," stated David Paiko, vice president of Home Entertainment at Rentrak.