For those of you who’ve never seen Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, I reccomend that you check it out. The movie is about a pair of misfits who go on a late night journey for White Castle burgers only to have one adventure after another. While they don’t have White Castles in San Francisco, for those who are luckly enough to live near a Meijer’s, Wendy’s or White Castle near Port Columbus Ohio, you’ll find a DVD misfit named E-Play that that is now offering locals movies, to go along with their dinners.

E-Play’s first prototype cost about $700,000 to develop and was created by Tom Lambers of Prospect, Ohio. He recently received a half a million tax grant that will allow him to expand the kiosks into more Ohio businesses and hopes to add 50 E-Play machines in various businesses by the end of the year. While E-Play is focusing their expansion on Ohio, it marks the first time that we’ve seen Wendy’s experiment with DVD kiosks and could serve as an important testing ground for the company, if things do go well.

While E-Play does not offer DVDs for rent, they do sell DVDs from $10 – $20 depending on the title. Each machines holds an inventory of approximately 800 DVDs, but the most exciting part about their kiosk is that not only will it eventually support movie sales to portable media players, but currently the company has said that they are in negotiations with Hollywood to bring burn on demand capabilities to the machines.

As someone who has watched the DVD kiosk industry grow from a few hundred Redbox machines to 1,630 current Redbox locations, over 600 TNR locations, over 500 DVDPlay kiosks, and over 150 DVDExpress kiosks, it’s very exciting to see burn on demand becoming a reality. E-Play may be small potatoes compared to some of the larger more established kiosk companies, but their ability to heavily saturate a single market gives them just as much of a chance as any major DVD kiosk provider. They are also the first kiosk company, that I have seen publically disclose that they are in negotiations to bring burn on demand to their customers.

While I am disappointed that their kiosks don’t support rentals and would be more interested in seeing the studios make licensing deals for burn on demand rental technology, it is encouraging nontheless, to see this small company making in-roads in an industry known for dragging their feet when it comes to technology.