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MoviePass will shut down for good on Sept. 14
- codyogden 7y agoOnly MoviePass _would_ announce they are closing in less than 24 hours. Dodged that massive bullet train wreck.
- lozaning 7y agoIsn't their shutting down proof positive that what they were giving customers was too good of a deal? Where you considering working their or something? Otherwise how is not purchasing something that's undervalued a train wreck?
- skinnymuch 7y agoWhat do you mean? Everyone knew it was going to go under at some point. Unless you bought the service very recently, it was worth it for everyone else. Especially during the growth times when it was unlimited for $10
- chipperyman573 7y ago"Helios and Matheson Analytics, MoviePass’ parent company, said it has formed a strategic review committee to explore a possible sale of all or some of its assets." I'd bet money that anyone that downloaded the MoviePass app will shortly have just about aaaaaaaall of their data sold
- ceejayoz 7y agoThat was the original plan, even. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moviepass-plans-to-make-money-by-selling-your-data-to-uber-eateries-and-hollywood-studios-2017-10-13 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moviepass-plans-to-make-mo... > “It’s about the data,” said Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc., which owns a majority stake in MoviePass.
- nolok 7y agoI mean the company is named analytics inc., it’s not like they’re hiding it
- krustyburger 7y agoMost users do not research the names of parent companies.
- benj111 7y agoBut you only know that because someone analysed user behaviour, so...
- jhall1468 7y agoThey also rarely read TOS, freely give out many pieces of identifying information without reading privacy policies, and, as you said, do virtually no research on a company or their ownership. At some point consumers have to get some of the blame here, right?
- ceejayoz 7y agoMost TOSes and privacy policies require a post-graduate level of education and several hours to properly understand - and that's for just one of the many services we interact with daily. I don't think it's reasonable to put that on the consumer.
- SkyBelow 7y agoSo do we throw out all basic contract law because of this? I'm not being facetious here. I actually think that contract law has significant problem in that it assumes a level of informed consent the average person cannot give when dealing with corporations that have specialized legal teams. It is one thing for two neighbors to enter into a contract since it is a meeting of near equal minds. But the average individual and the entire legal team of some large corporation? I would find a child entering into a contract with an adult to be more likely to have informed consent.
- gravypod 7y agoWhen a company like this goes under where does all the code, configs, etc go? It'd be cool to see how they threw it all together.
- dplgk 7y agoBased on how well it appeared to work they definitely "threw it all together".
- oplav 7y agoA MoviePass recruiter reached out to me a couple months ago. I regret not taking the interview just to see what it was like on the inside.
- ceejayoz 7y agoStripe has a product you could use for this sort of thing. https://stripe.com/issuing https://stripe.com/issuing
- bythe4mile 7y agoSo I am a bit confused as to how Stripe Issuing helps us figure out the underlying technologies that ties a company as OP above asked? Am I missing something?
- ceejayoz 7y agoWasn’t MoviePass largely a card you could only use at the theater you reserved a ticket at, to pay for that ticket?
- smitop 7y agoStripe Issuing lets you specify a webhook can approve/decline transactions [1], so you could use that to only approve transactions at a certain movie theater. [1] https://stripe.com/docs/issuing/authorizations https://stripe.com/docs/issuing/authorizations
- rvz 7y agoWell, MoviePass also had a laughable security breach from what I recall from the past month [0]. A password-less and unencrypted database exposed on the net with user credentials in the millions all containing personal identifiable information (PII), which sounds like a recipe for disaster and a fraudsters dream. Well done if you dodged that slow moving car crash. > MoviePass notified subscribers that it plans to close down the service because its “efforts to recapitalize MoviePass have not been successful to date.” Good riddance. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/moviepass-thousands-data-exposed-leak/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/moviepass-thousands-data-e...
- ProfessorLayton 7y agoI would like to thank all the investors that greatly contributed to my entertainment. It was a fun, and very unsustainable ride, but no regrets. I'm actually considering the subscription service provided by the big players, so they did change the industry somewhat.
- sgarman 7y agoAs someone who didn't have a movie pass I was too entertained watching this whole thing play out. Venture subsidized products are always a wild ride. I miss all my VC subsidized food deliveries.
- rolltiide 7y agoSame, and I feel that half way through its lifespan I felt I had already missed the boat to get enough out of it. I also don't go to the movies enough anymore. I watch so much on flights now that more and more things are moved into the "I'll just watch it on a flight in a few months" territory. The flights themselves being pretty cheap or free - subsidized by the merchants that paid for my points.
- nolok 7y agoEh at least those merchants still made money on it, moviepass basically never made a cent
- jedberg 7y agoKeep in mind that movies on flights are sometimes edited and they don't tell you. They especially remove any scenes involving plane crashes. So you know, you might be missing some critical scenes in some movies. :)
- zeta0134 7y agoMy immediate understanding was that the parent poster was planning to watch the movies on his laptop or something similar. But, I don't fly very often; are in-flight movies a popular option? Genuinely curious.
- thomasjudge 7y agoLose money on every sale, make it up in volume…
- crooked-v 7y agoLose money on every sale, make it up by selling all the personal info of the customers to anyone who will buy.
- bhj 7y agoThey actually lost more each time an existing customer used their product, which is a bit of a red flag
- benburleson 7y ago<thatsthejoke.bmp>
- boffinism 7y agoNope, the old sales joke is based on the idea that they lose the same amount each time.
- quickthrower2 7y agoOn the plus side it created a monopoly, all those ramen profitable companies had no way to compete!
- OrgNet 7y agosounds like a great idea, let me invest please
- pearjuice 7y agoWhat typically happens to all the intellectual property when a company like this shuts down? Do the investors become shared right holders or something due to lack of return?
- Monroe13 7y agoIP assets are often sold at auction or in private transactions. Private equity firms and patent licensing companies play in this space. For example Fortress (now owned by SoftBank) cut a deal for Theranos’ IP: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/theranos-closes-deal-with-fortress-to-shut-down-embattled-firm-2018-09-13 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/theranos-closes-deal-with-...
- brainpool 7y agoIn this case, when there is absolutely no intellectual property to talk about, everyone huddles down and hopes that no one notices their investment. In other cases, the proprietary body attempts to sell the IP to cover debts. Shareholders walk but are usually eligible to pay for the IP at the same rate as any other buyer. Sometimes this is used by shady boards to get control of a company and their IP.
- filmgirlcw 7y agoLast year, I bought a MoviePass t-shirt from the company’s merch site in anticipation of just this event. I’m going to wear it tomorrow. But more seriously, as someone who has followed MoviePass since 2011 (I was even on a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival with the OG founder/CEO, something I forgot about until I found a photo of myself on Getty doing a Google search), I’m sad that a startup that probably wasn’t ever going to work flamed our this way, backed by a penny stock company that has all the hallmarks of being involved in something really unsavory (I’m not saying Helios & Matheson are con artists or involved in some sort of money laundering scheme; I’m just saying I understand why people might ask that question). The truth is, the MoviePass model would never work without partnership with the theater chains (and possibly studios — tho that’s gets a little tricker b/c of the Paramount Decree), and even then, that would only be temporary. Even without Ted and Mitch intentionally trolling the theater chains, AMC and Regal would ultimately figure out that If they were serious about a subscription plan, it would make more sense to build it in house/keep it limited to its own brands, rather than paying a middle man for customers that might not have chain loyalty. Stacy Spikes, The MoviePass founder and CEO (who was replaced as CEO before the $10 plan launched and was then unceremoniously fired) is a great guy. I was glad to read even all of this insanity has helped him raise money for his next thing. As for the other clowns, well, I’m thankful for the year plus of entertainment.
- seltzered_ 7y agoI love how you collect shirts of failed companies & wear em on msdn shows, it’s like a underhanded memento mori of sorts.
- pchristensen 7y agoThe Groupon office lobby had a picture of Andrew Mason on the cover of a magazine, surrounded by magazine covers of famous dotcom meltdowns. I always loved that. Well, that and the cat UFO. See https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4cec169bccd1d5e76e060000-480-320.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4cec169bccd1d5e76e060..., https://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-office-tour-2010-11#theres-groupon-cofounder-and-ceo-andrew-masons-recent-forbes-cover-in-the-middle-surrounded-by-magazine-covers-of-famous-dotcom-meltdowns-like-myspace-netscape-and-aol-this-is-how-mason-keeps-himself-grounded-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-office-tour-2010-11#...
- cityzen 7y agoMOVIEPASS4EVER Probably my favorite startup yet. If you're going to burn through millions of VC money, may as well let everyone come along for the ride!
- PorterDuff 7y agoIt's hard to beat the Pixelon launch party. Someone should really make a movie on that one.
- cityzen 7y agoOh do tell!? Actually I found this on Wikipedia: The history of the company has been used as an academic case study in the study of corporate governance and ethics[14] and also as the subject in 2019 National Geographic's docudrama miniseries Valley of the Boom.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoIt's true. We need more trainwrecks whose primary failure was being too good a deal for the customer, and fewer trainwrecks like Juicero.
- paul7986 7y agoThere's another similar service for concerts and events. Pay $40 a month to attend 3 concerts, sporting events or events in general. I used it here in the DC/Baltimore area for concerts..live it. Though do wonder how me paying $13 for a concert ticket vs. $50 to $60 they'll stay in business? It's called InWeGo...available in select US cities.
- jandrese 7y agoThat does seem a bit too good. For less than the cost of one ticket a month you get three tickets? Is there some limitation like you can only get tickets the day of (filling what would otherwise be empty seats) or something?
- koboll 7y agoYou can't reserve tickets until 5 days before an event, so I think it's similar to other last-minute deal services -- filling unsold capacity.
- rainyMammoth 7y agoyeah this is their business model I would guess. It's actually pretty smart and might work.
- cbhl 7y agoI'd recommend listening to Episode 468 of Planet Money: Kid Rock Vs. The Scalpers. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/28/671580422/episode-468-kid-rock-vs-the-scalpers https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/28/671580422/epis... Concerts and events have high fixed costs, so, like airlines, it's typical for them to engage in price discrimination to maximize profits. If there's assigned seating, they charge more for the best seats. But they also want the best fans (usually high-energy teenagers) to have access, so they need a way to get cheap tickets to those people. Plus, if you go to a concerts or events from cheap tickets, maybe you'll learn to like concerts and events and end up being more likely to splurge on expensive tickets later. (Many symphonies and orchestras offer discounted tickets to students, youth, or under 30/40 for this purpose.)
- skizm 7y agoNot sure how ticket pricing works, or what sort of deals theaters could work with the publishers, but if they had only sold tickets through moviepass after the listed showtime, I feel like they could have made it work. Moviegoers would really only be able to take advantage of less popular movies and/or showtimes because buying the ticket so late risks a sellout or bad seats (might not be able to sit near friends). The income would mostly be gravy / found money for publishers because it would mostly be people who wouldn't have gone otherwise. Moviepass might have been able to work out some sort of rev-share based on number of tickets sold so they could guarantee some income from each member's monthly payment. Hell this might even get you over the hump into AOL / Planet Fitness territory where you're almost entirely sustained by revenue from people who forgot they're paying for their subscriptions (I assume this was always the ultimate goal for Moviepass).
- chadlavi 7y agoWouldn't this just encourage lots of people to not buy a full price ticket and just wait in the lobby for the discount price?
- covercash 7y agoPeople would quickly learn how to abuse that system by just waiting to purchase tickets. I think the theater+restaurant combos would actually be ideal for the Moviepass model since they can offset the cost of the ticket with food/alcohol sales. They could even limit it to 3 movies/wk like AMC and probably do well. The theater+restaurant near me offers a $5 ticket Tuesday promotion and most showings throughout the day are full. If they charged me $25/mo I’d definitely pop in 1-2 times a week to watch a movie while I eat a meal.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- noneeeed 7y agoThe problem for MoviePass has been that a membership scheme is something the cinema chains can and do run themselves. In fact when I first heard of MP around 2017 the Odeon chain in the UK had something similar that a colleague used at least once a week.
- k3nosis 7y agoThe GrooveShark of the movie industry. Thanks for changing the way we watch movies.
- dawhizkid 7y agoThe most interesting thing about this whole thing is how irrational the public market can be, especially at a time when there’s so much scrutiny on private valuations. I don’t remember the highest marketcap the company reached but it was skyrocketing at some point despite never really having pivoted on its business model.
- luismmolina 7y agoHere in Mexico we have something similar. You pay $9.5USD a month and you have unlimited access. This was before MoviePass and it is still working.
- ben174 7y agoAMC theaters has A-List which is similar. https://www.amctheatres.com/amcstubs/alist https://www.amctheatres.com/amcstubs/alist
- fludlight 7y agoIn the USA the cost of a single adult movie ticket is ~$15. Charging less than that per month for unlimited movies was puzzling.
- thekyle 7y agoDepends on where in the U.S. where I am currently adult tickets are $11.
- yardstick 7y agoIn the UK, Cineworld has a £18/month deal for unlimited movies. Based on discounted/special offer ticket prices of ~£8 you need to watch about 2.5 movies a month to make it value for money. Having used it for 10+ years now it’s still good value for me.
- olnluis 7y agoWhich service/chain? I'm in Mexico too and I've never heard about it.
- luismmolina 7y agoCinépolis Cine Club Standard
- CryptoCuzo 7y agoThats crazy
- OrgNet 7y agothey lasted a lot longer then I anticipated
- NoblePublius 7y agoFormer MoviePass consultant here. Pretty sure the whole thing was a con. After being hired, I quickly pointed out major flaws in the product that allowed for users to share accounts or use their cards to buy popcorn or let theaters arbitrarily charge MoviePass customers higher prices. Mitch was never technical enough to comprehend the minutiae and Ted never acted with urgency when confronted with cold hard evidence that his users were effectively stealing millions of dollars from the company. They sold dollars for 75 cents. Kind of like WeWork.
- brainpool 7y agoWhat was the con exactly? Selling dollars for cents is not a con, it is stupid. Different thing.
- NoblePublius 7y agoPumping and dumping their stock. Mitch and Ted both cashed out millions directly as well. It’s all in the public filings, amazingly. Citron did the best expose.
- quickthrower2 7y agoPopcorn? I wonder do some movie theatres sell alcohol? Would it be possible to get a bottle of scotch on the card?
- skinnymuch 7y agoCould you do the popcorn thing the whole time when it was unlimited?
- NoblePublius 7y agoBasically you could spend as much as you wanted in $15 increments within 30 seconds of “checking in”. The system was full of holes. They lost millions of dollars to outright fraud. It took my team two weeks to architect fixes that we could have implemented in a month. They chose to keep their current dev and didn’t patch many of the exploits we found for literally a year.
- chooseaname 7y agoIt gets bad on Friday the 13th. But it gets worse on Saturday the 14th! Edit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083033/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083033/
- cityzen 7y agoHahaha, I remember watching that movie when it came out.
- xivzgrev 7y agowhen the gravy train is running, hop on and ride as long as you can. Sometimes like this it crashes and burns, sometimes like Uber/lyft it slowly Peters out (and it’s still a gravy train, just not nearly as much so as before)
- basementcat 7y agoSomeone should make a MoviePass movie.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoQ: How do you know when an Internet bubble is about to burst? A: When profits start to matter.
- quickthrower2 7y agoI don't think we'll have a specific "internet bubble" anymore. The profits of the internet (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.) are heavily tied to the health of the general economy. The internet bit isn't that novel anymore.
- intopieces 7y agoStartups are not designed to be profitable on their own anymore. The dream is not to be the next Google or Facebook. It’s to get acquired by Google or Facebook.
- skinnymuch 7y agoRecent tech IPOs have been amongst others: Pinterest, Crowdstrike, Zoom, Fiverr, Upwork (as comparison to Fiverr), Uber, Lyft, Medallia, PagerDuty, Tufin, Life360, Cloudflare. A lot of these companies could be bought by a huge tech company, but they can’t all be aiming for that, can they? Upwork and Fiverr likely never will. Zoom is [a bit] profitable. For other hyped startups like Airbnb and Palantir, they aren’t angling to get bought out by an FB or Google either.
- paulpauper 7y agoIt's pretty amazing how much attention the Movie Pass story has gotten. This is a tiny micro cap company and stock that has garnered national media coverage because its crappy business plan, which was doomed from the start, predictably failed. And a lot of people used the service. In an era of web 2.0 companies that just burn endless cash but somehow keep chugging along (such as Uber and dozens others), I think we all want to see a good failure story and this one delivers. Maybe if they had integrated cloud storage or cloud video or temporary workplaces or ride services into their business model somehow, it would be worth billions now.
- newshorts 7y agoThey just needed autonomous movie viewing...
- brainpool 7y agoI’m most amazed that they started at all. The whole idea is just bonkers. Why would cinemas give away free tickets to a third party so that they can make recurring revenues that would siphon their own? No, and they didn’t. Even if they would be as stupid as to go along with it, the first mover advantage for MoviePass was so low as they could easily be outcompeted. I would love to see the pitch for this pipe dream in the cloud.
- intopieces 7y agoI thought the whole idea was to pivot to an analytics company? Not sure how that would even work.
- rightbyte 7y agoI can't see how so indirect consumer data as which theatre movies they watch would be worth much.
- Kye 7y agoThe tyranny of unit economics.
- lamdauf 7y agoI guess MoviePass is trying a free PR here, sorry OP, speaking of the devil is some kind of PR.
- liquidgecka 7y agoA few years ago I was accidentally emailed movie pass subscriber numbers Alo g with a ton of financial information. (I have a very short Gmail address that is a common fisrt and last name).. I didn't delve into the details too far but the high level summary primed me to expect this day much sooner than it actually ended up being.
- enahs-sf 7y agoDoes this mean $HMNY will go back up???
- llamataboot 7y agoFor every 100 people with great startup ideas and no access to capital, there's at least 1 with an idea that will never work that gets funded I suppose.
- MagnumPIG 7y agoFunny sketch on this topic from CollegeHumor, about a year old: https://youtu.be/YBO_7UezpbY https://youtu.be/YBO_7UezpbY
- austinl 7y agoI'd strongly recommend this longer read by Jason Guerrasio about the rise and fall MoviePass: https://outline.com/ZPqaXs https://outline.com/ZPqaXs — really captures the whole story end to end. Original link with ad-block paywall: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-moviepass-rise-fall-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-moviepass-rise-...
- dakijon 7y agoI have blank t-shirt, are you interesting?
- pnk77 7y agogood
- smashah 7y agoHow you Americans mess up what's been working in the UK for years is beyond me. (this post was brought to you by the Cineworld Unlimted Gang)
- skinnymuch 7y agoThat’s only at Cineworld theatres. MoviePass was at one point, most theatres in the country. AMC, the largest theatre chain in the world, has a successful subscription service also limited to its chain.
- ijiiijji1 7y agoMP is like Uber and Lyft: a magical unicorn business model that consumers thought they could get something for nothing, e.g., it was never sustainable.
- platon555 7y agoGood
- probably_wrong 7y agoSeeing as there are two other new accounts with really short comments like yours (that will soon be drowned by downvotes), I have to ask: are you a human? If not a bot, why did you create an account simply to say "good"?
- m12k 7y agoI hope this once and for all puts the nail in the coffin of the hand-wavy "we'll collect info that is super valuable to someone else and sell it to them" business model. Sure, if you can collect enough of it cheaply enough and sell it cheaply enough to someone that can monetize it directly (e.g. selling demographics info to ad networks for targeting) you might make it. But if you're collecting this info at any sort of significant cost, then you have to be able to monetize it yourself. Otherwise the 'purchaser' will just gladly tell you in meetings how much they'll pay for the data, when in reality it's just a super low risk way for them to see if this data holds any value for them - if it does, they'll figure out their own way of collecting it and cut you out of the equation. And more likely, it'll turn out not to be valuable (or it'll turn out their organization isn't capable of acting on it) and they'll just back out again.
- sgt101 7y agoYup. The model that works is to collect the data and offer services based on your proprietary access to the data. Crucially you already need a business / operant market for that to work. A good example is Sky in the UK where they collect audience data and offer a targetted advertising (you tell us what kpi you want to move, we choose the slots) model vs a standard (you choose the slots that you want to buy) to monetize. Upsides : - retain control of data - clear vs GDPR - proprietary knowledge developed - hard to replicate Downsides - harder to set up - bigger up front risk for you
- aka2411 7y agoreally sad news.
- coldtea 7y agoShould we see this as a business failing? Or as the founders, CEO etc making lots of millions off of investors?
- stjohnswarts 7y agoI really took advantage of this haha. A candle that burns twice as bright. I stopped using it as soon as they started adding tons of gimmics and IFTTT qualifiers