According to a new study from the NPD Group, the marketshare for standalone movie rental kiosks surpassed that of traditional retail store rentals in the U.S. last year.

In other words, we weren"t the only ones spending more time with the Redbox next to the 7-11 rather than the local Blockbuster.

Subscription rental services like Netflix still represent the lion"s share of video rentals — 41% in the third quarter of 2010 — but NPD notes that kiosk rentals are now in second place at 31%, just ahead of in-store rentals at 27%.

Kiosk rentals gained 10 percentage points year-over-year — and this was despite the 28-day rental windows imposed by some major studios. Meanwhile, the percentage of traditional video store rentals declined by 13 percentage points, with subscription rental marketshare staying relatively flat, increasing by two points.

Categorically, this represents a significant shift in consumer behavior in the past year. Just last year, subscription rent-by-mail services like Netflix were in a dead-heat with retail rental chains in terms of marketshare.

In the past 12 months, momentum has continued to build behind Redbox (that tiff with the big studios probably only raised the company"s profile), while at the same time former-behemoth Blockbuster has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Redbox is a disruptor to be sure, having effectively finished off what was left of Blockbuster"s rental business (to wit, Blockbuster"s newest strategy is not to copy Netflix, but to copy Redbox).

The NPD study only focuses on actual physical disc rentals — not rentals using subscription streaming services (which is an area Netflix is actively increasing its focus), video on-demand from cable providers or digital rentals from places like iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and others. We would be interested in seeing a breakdown or comparison between digital rentals and physical disc rentals.

How do you rent movies? Have you found yourself making more trips to Redbox than Blockbuster in the past 12 months? more