Hot on the heels of the news that Redbox knuckled under to the studios’ demands for a rental window comes the exciting announcement that Redbox, starting in the second quarter of this year (so sometime between March and May fifteenth, typically) will be offering Blu-ray discs.

Now, before you get all excited, there are two important caveats, kiddies, as they say in Fallout 3:

1. They will NOT cost a dollar. There’s no solid data on pricing, but the CEO of Coinstar (Redbox’s parent company) is on record that they will be “for sure higher than our standard DVDs”.

2. You will still have to wait a month after the standard “release” date to get them. They’ll fall under the same classification as Redbox’s regular DVD loadout and thus be subject to the same window.

This combination of buzzkills leads me to wonder just how effective a move this will actually be.  With Blockbuster and any other brick-and-mortar outlet now getting a new lease on life thanks to the window system, will people still want cheap Blu-ray a month late?

The negative economy, on the other hand, leads me to believe otherwise….