Oct. 25--The explosive growth of Redbox Automated Retail L.L.C. and its $1-a-night DVD movie rentals is rattling Hollywood.

Redbox -- a division of Coinstar Inc., which supplies kiddie rides and change counters in supermarkets -- is adding one of its DVD-dispensing kiosks every hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, someplace in the United States. It could be a Wal-Mart, a Walgreen's, a Kroger.

There are 400 Redbox kiosks in the Philadelphia area now, many of them in Acme, ShopRite, and Super Fresh supermarkets, and about 20,000 nationwide. Eventually, some think, the number could approach 60,000.

Consumers hooked on their convenience and low prices have rented about 160 million Redbox DVDs this year, and the company's revenue should double in 2009, analysts say.

"Redbox created an incredibly efficient way to distribute movies, and we pass those savings on to consumers," Mitch Lowe, a former Netflix Inc. executive who is Redbox's president, said Thursday in a phone interview. "Because of the dollar price point, people are watching movies they wouldn't otherwise."

In court documents, Chicago suburbs-based Redbox estimates that its $1-a-night policy saves consumers about $450 million a year when compared with Blockbuster Inc., Netflix, and other competitors.

But Hollywood hopes this business crashes and burns like a stunt car in The Fast and the Furious. Three major movie studios, which tolerated Redbox when it was a smaller company, have choked off supplies of new DVDs.

The studios, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Universal Studios Inc. ordered big DVD wholesalers to stop supplying Redbox. Come Tuesday, it will be cut off.

Entertainment executives lean heavily on the afterburn of new-movie DVD sales for studio profit -- a new release costs about $20. They say they believe Redbox's buck-a-night rentals cannibalize and threaten that business.

These are hard times for DVDs in general, which does not help the relationship between Redbox and the studios.

Industry experts say the market for DVDs will shrink this year. Blockbuster, for instance, says it will close about 1,000 stores nationwide. The independent TLA Video has not quite thrown in the towel, but it closed its South Fourth Street location last week.

Wall Street analysts warn that the popularity of Redbox's high-tech red kiosks -- as well as anticipated copycat operators that will match the $1-a-night price -- also pose a threat to Comcast Corp.'s video-on-demand business, whose titles cost about $4 a day.

But that is just for starters. Comcast could be doubly threatened.