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At first this article seemed like some sort of new "interactive movie" thing, but I was mildly disappointed in the end to read that it was actually just about a

At first this article seemed like some sort of new "interactive movie" thing, but I was mildly disappointed in the end to read that it was actually just about a technical problem at the movie theater. (don't get me wrong, it's a good article) >"This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes . . . A future where corporations are so obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn’t make sense to staff a theater with technical help because things only go wrong sometimes. A future with a friendlier past." It doesn't make sense for a theater to have a high-paid techie on staff to handle the small percentage of the time some major technical glitch happens. Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money towards a better overall movie-going experience (those times when glitches don't happen anyways). I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing.

rglullis 7y ago
I don't think I've been to any movie theater in the past 5 years that is any different from a theater that I could go 20 years ago. To me this shows that the money is not going to a "better overall movie-going experience", but rather just that movie theaters are getting squeezed by the studios, rising video-on-demand, etc, and not all theaters are responding to it: they will milk whatever they can then from their properties until they simply won't be profitable/justifiable anymore and go bankrupt.
- Magi604 7y ago
  I only go to the theaters rarely (2-3 times a year) but the last one I went to was pretty nice. Online booking so you can choose your seat beforehand and not worry about lining up early to snag a good spot, reclining chairs, low seat density. If I go see another movie at a theater, a reclining chair is a must. This was a newer theater though (opened in the last 5-6 years or so). Perhaps owners of older theaters that just make good money with how they are now won't bother with upgrades as long as profits are good, but they'll be left behind when newer theaters or older theaters that spend money enhancing the customer experience start getting more audiences.
rchaud 7y ago
> It doesn't make sense for a theater to have a high-paid techie on staff to handle the small percentage of the time some major technical glitch happens. Except in cases where there is no fallback for when failures do happen, which was the case in the article. Then having knowledgeable staff makes a lot of sense. > Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money towards a better overall movie-going experience Is there any evidence of this happening? Customers' time was wasted and the theater lost money on that showing due to all the refunds that had to be issued.
- hug 7y ago
  Well, yes, of course having a tech on is worth it if the tech has something to do. That's how jobs work. The problem for the cinema is whether or not the tech has something to do often enough that his salary is less than the refunds they have to make if he doesn't exist. Your parent post is suggesting that the cinema has done the math and said "fuck it, that doesn't happen often enough that we care". You can't determine whether the cinema lost money on the film: You know that some people received refunds, which means the movie made less money than it could have, but you have no data on whether or not half the patrons kept watching and still paid. (And even then no data on whether or not that covers costs. Maybe they all bought huge buckets of popcorn, a higher margin product, that they didn't refund.) We also don't have an estimate on how frequently this goes wrong, although we can guess that the frequency is low enough that the chain doesn't see the need to keep techs on -- and, in fact, the previous technical role of the projectionist been largely eliminated.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    I'm guessing it's worth just not paying an on-site technician and giving refunds whenever a problem happens. back of the envelope calculation. say you have a multiplex with five theaters, and each theater (200 seats, 50% full on average) cycles a movie every three hours. you're open from noon to midnight. a ticket costs $10 and a cinema tech costs $20/hr, so $240 a day just for one. your average seating brings 200 * 0.5 * $10 = $1000 of revenue from ticket sales (I'm assuming you don't refund popcorn). from a first-order analysis, it doesn't make sense to hire the on-premises tech unless the movie equipment malfunctions in at least one showing every four days (or once per 80 showings). to me, that sounds like a pretty high failure rate, but I don't actually know anything about cinema equipment. I'd guess that if your stuff malfunctioned that often, people would get pretty mad even if the tech intervened. obviously I neglected a few things here. maybe that one theater will continue to malfunction throughout the rest of the day, forgoing more revenue. maybe even if the tech intervenes after five minutes, people ask for a refund anyway. maybe your reputation gets so bad that you have to start giving concessions vouchers along with the refund to get people to come back.
arkitaip 7y ago
It is a terrible thing going to the movie theater and not even being able to watch the movie you paid for. That's the ONE THING you need to get right, if you run a movie theater. Also, in a lot of situations where tech goes wrong, even normally intelligent non-technicians can solve issues given the proper resources. Sometimes a troubleshooting checklist is all you need.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Zedronar 7y ago
  Is it so terrible to once in a while have an inconvenience like this, compared to other actual problems that society has nowadays?
floren 7y ago
> Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money towards a better overall movie-going experience (those times when glitches don't happen anyways). Apparently they're not saving enough money, because a movie with a listed 8:00 showtime won't actually start rolling until 8:20 with all the ads they cram in there at the start. Sure hasn't made my movie-going experience any better.
- lb1lf 7y ago
  My local theater is refreshingly honest about this (probably some annoyed employee letting off some steam) - under the screen displaying the showtimes, a poster has been put up stating 'Given times are start of commercials. Feature starts twelve minutes after posted time.'
vsareto 7y ago
>I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing. It really isn't. If the theater company loses enough business, it won't exist any more. And TBH there isn't much they can really do against streaming services delivered for cheap in amazing quality. We're less willing to pay the time cost of going out and dealing with a bad theater, traffic, disruptive people in the theater, etc. But I think the author is more worried about a general lax approach to handling things when technology goes wrong. It's fine for a movie theater to have IT problems, but less so a hospital or government service. And personally I'm not at all sure some hospitals or governments are above movie theaters in technical prowess.
perennate 7y ago
> I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing. My impression was that the author wasn't saying it's a bad thing to have occasional technical issues. The author criticized how, when a technical issue inevitably came up, the theater staff didn't explain what's going on. After some time the staff restarted the movie, indicating they knew there was a problem, but didn't bother to tell the audience anything. The author did also mention not having technical staff on site, but I think the primary problem was communication.
simion314 7y ago
>I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing. The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this bugs can repeat. What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a movie? It could be some DRM protected computer that plays the movie and you need special keys to do anything more then plug it out and back in.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  It sounded like the reboot worked but people didn't want to sit through the first half hour again.
  - simion314 7y ago
    Yes. so the future is that evrthung will be automated and all employees will at best know how to unplug and plug back the systems. If the computer would say you don't exist or you can't do X there will be nobody to help you, like in the article it was earlier on first page, if your name is Dick then bad luck for you. there is no human you can contact that has the power to help you buy or do whatever you need.
- dwild 7y ago
  > The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this bugs can repeat. They probably have a technician on call which can answer before the next day, but not instantly during an issue. The most likely issue is a part that broke, you really expect movie theaters to stock parts for everything and always having someone able to replace them? Your ideal movie theater would bankrupt quite fast. Instead the chain may have a stock for many theaters (or a contract to get replacement quick) and a technician able to go from one to another quickly (or again, a contract for this). > What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a movie? It's not clear from the article whether he did wait enough or just abandonned once they got the movie back on. I frequently go see movies, so I have seen many technical issues and they always were able to fast foward. No technical issues are alike and them figuring it out is clearly always a struggle, so it's rarely quick to fix.

rglullis 7y ago

I don't think I've been to any movie theater in the past 5 years that is any different from a theater that I could go 20 years ago. To me this shows that the money is not going to a "better overall movie-going experience", but rather just that movie theaters are getting squeezed by the studios, rising video-on-demand, etc, and not all theaters are responding to it: they will milk whatever they can then from their properties until they simply won't be profitable/justifiable anymore and go bankrupt.

Magi604 7y ago
I only go to the theaters rarely (2-3 times a year) but the last one I went to was pretty nice. Online booking so you can choose your seat beforehand and not worry about lining up early to snag a good spot, reclining chairs, low seat density. If I go see another movie at a theater, a reclining chair is a must. This was a newer theater though (opened in the last 5-6 years or so). Perhaps owners of older theaters that just make good money with how they are now won't bother with upgrades as long as profits are good, but they'll be left behind when newer theaters or older theaters that spend money enhancing the customer experience start getting more audiences.

rchaud 7y ago

> It doesn't make sense for a theater to have a high-paid techie on staff to handle the small percentage of the time some major technical glitch happens. Except in cases where there is no fallback for when failures do happen, which was the case in the article. Then having knowledgeable staff makes a lot of sense. > Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money towards a better overall movie-going experience Is there any evidence of this happening? Customers' time was wasted and the theater lost money on that showing due to all the refunds that had to be issued.

hug 7y ago
Well, yes, of course having a tech on is worth it if the tech has something to do. That's how jobs work. The problem for the cinema is whether or not the tech has something to do often enough that his salary is less than the refunds they have to make if he doesn't exist. Your parent post is suggesting that the cinema has done the math and said "fuck it, that doesn't happen often enough that we care". You can't determine whether the cinema lost money on the film: You know that some people received refunds, which means the movie made less money than it could have, but you have no data on whether or not half the patrons kept watching and still paid. (And even then no data on whether or not that covers costs. Maybe they all bought huge buckets of popcorn, a higher margin product, that they didn't refund.) We also don't have an estimate on how frequently this goes wrong, although we can guess that the frequency is low enough that the chain doesn't see the need to keep techs on -- and, in fact, the previous technical role of the projectionist been largely eliminated.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I'm guessing it's worth just not paying an on-site technician and giving refunds whenever a problem happens. back of the envelope calculation. say you have a multiplex with five theaters, and each theater (200 seats, 50% full on average) cycles a movie every three hours. you're open from noon to midnight. a ticket costs $10 and a cinema tech costs $20/hr, so $240 a day just for one. your average seating brings 200 * 0.5 * $10 = $1000 of revenue from ticket sales (I'm assuming you don't refund popcorn). from a first-order analysis, it doesn't make sense to hire the on-premises tech unless the movie equipment malfunctions in at least one showing every four days (or once per 80 showings). to me, that sounds like a pretty high failure rate, but I don't actually know anything about cinema equipment. I'd guess that if your stuff malfunctioned that often, people would get pretty mad even if the tech intervened. obviously I neglected a few things here. maybe that one theater will continue to malfunction throughout the rest of the day, forgoing more revenue. maybe even if the tech intervenes after five minutes, people ask for a refund anyway. maybe your reputation gets so bad that you have to start giving concessions vouchers along with the refund to get people to come back.

arkitaip 7y ago

It is a terrible thing going to the movie theater and not even being able to watch the movie you paid for. That's the ONE THING you need to get right, if you run a movie theater. Also, in a lot of situations where tech goes wrong, even normally intelligent non-technicians can solve issues given the proper resources. Sometimes a troubleshooting checklist is all you need.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Zedronar 7y ago
Is it so terrible to once in a while have an inconvenience like this, compared to other actual problems that society has nowadays?

floren 7y ago

> Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money towards a better overall movie-going experience (those times when glitches don't happen anyways). Apparently they're not saving enough money, because a movie with a listed 8:00 showtime won't actually start rolling until 8:20 with all the ads they cram in there at the start. Sure hasn't made my movie-going experience any better.

lb1lf 7y ago
My local theater is refreshingly honest about this (probably some annoyed employee letting off some steam) - under the screen displaying the showtimes, a poster has been put up stating 'Given times are start of commercials. Feature starts twelve minutes after posted time.'

vsareto 7y ago

>I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing. It really isn't. If the theater company loses enough business, it won't exist any more. And TBH there isn't much they can really do against streaming services delivered for cheap in amazing quality. We're less willing to pay the time cost of going out and dealing with a bad theater, traffic, disruptive people in the theater, etc. But I think the author is more worried about a general lax approach to handling things when technology goes wrong. It's fine for a movie theater to have IT problems, but less so a hospital or government service. And personally I'm not at all sure some hospitals or governments are above movie theaters in technical prowess.

perennate 7y ago

> I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing. My impression was that the author wasn't saying it's a bad thing to have occasional technical issues. The author criticized how, when a technical issue inevitably came up, the theater staff didn't explain what's going on. After some time the staff restarted the movie, indicating they knew there was a problem, but didn't bother to tell the audience anything. The author did also mention not having technical staff on site, but I think the primary problem was communication.

simion314 7y ago

>I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad thing. The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this bugs can repeat. What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a movie? It could be some DRM protected computer that plays the movie and you need special keys to do anything more then plug it out and back in.

jonny_eh 7y ago
It sounded like the reboot worked but people didn't want to sit through the first half hour again.
- simion314 7y ago
  Yes. so the future is that evrthung will be automated and all employees will at best know how to unplug and plug back the systems. If the computer would say you don't exist or you can't do X there will be nobody to help you, like in the article it was earlier on first page, if your name is Dick then bad luck for you. there is no human you can contact that has the power to help you buy or do whatever you need.
dwild 7y ago
> The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this bugs can repeat. They probably have a technician on call which can answer before the next day, but not instantly during an issue. The most likely issue is a part that broke, you really expect movie theaters to stock parts for everything and always having someone able to replace them? Your ideal movie theater would bankrupt quite fast. Instead the chain may have a stock for many theaters (or a contract to get replacement quick) and a technician able to go from one to another quickly (or again, a contract for this). > What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a movie? It's not clear from the article whether he did wait enough or just abandonned once they got the movie back on. I frequently go see movies, so I have seen many technical issues and they always were able to fast foward. No technical issues are alike and them figuring it out is clearly always a struggle, so it's rarely quick to fix.