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Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee
- jedberg 7y agoMy first thought of course was the Seinfeld episode, which they convenient linked to at the end of the article: https://youtu.be/qM79_itR0Nc?t=15 https://youtu.be/qM79_itR0Nc?t=15 I wonder how much that one person gets paid to basically double check the monitoring. I hope they have another task to keep them busy.
- flavmartins 7y agoSame. Anytime you hear "movie phone" you immediately have to say, "why don't you just TELL me the name of the movie you'd like to see?"
- notJim 7y agoLiterally said that to myself out loud as soon as I saw the name Moviefone.
- zw123456 7y agoIt proves again that there is a Seinfeld episode for everything.
- ravenstine 7y agoThe other day, I had a conversation with my parents about the cultural impact of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and we couldn't think of any other shows that top them in that way. Old episodes of both shows are still memeable to this day.
- LeoPanthera 7y agoFriends. And to a slightly lesser extent, Cheers (and Frasier).
- 3131s 7y agoThe whole world watches Friends, but Seinfeld not so much. Did anyone else not ever like Cheers?
- macintux 7y agoSomeone pointed out that Cheers started great but lost its heart when Colasanto (“Coach”) passed away. It obviously lasted a long time, but it transitioned into more of a traditional sitcom.
- tombert 7y agoMaybe some of the early Spongebob episodes; I still occasionally say "These claws aren't just for attractin' mates!"
- ravenstine 7y agoCan't believe I forgot Spongebob! That's a pretty good example, actually.
- barry-cotter 7y agoThe Simpsons have nothing on post WWII tv shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver etc. When there were very few tv channels and after when some tv shows played on repeat forever anytime the networks needed something to fill a slot you’d get something close to saturation of knowledge of characters and situations. Even for wildly popular series like GoT this will never happen again. The consolidated audience isn’t there. For a brief post war moment there was accidentally a TV canon.
- statuehectic 7y agoIf we're talking globally though, I don't think anything has ever had (or will ever have again) the global saturation of The Simpsons. I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver never had international success and existed at a time when TV wasn't as globally popular. Even within the US, Leave it to Beaver never broke into the Nielsen Top 30. Meanwhile in many countries, The Simpsons got the treatment you're talking about. I grew up in Australia, where at least 7 episodes of The Simpsons have aired in primetime per week for almost 30 years, and for half that time most people only had 3 commercial channels. I just checked the TV guide, and it's running from 6:30 PM to 9 PM tonight on network TV and airing 6 episodes throughout the day on cable. If you're under 45, The Simpsons saturated popular culture during your youth, and the same is true for friends and colleagues from around the world. 40 year old Mexicans and 4 year old New Zealanders know the same show in a way that was never true for Lucy or Beaver.
- ravenstine 7y agoGranted, I didn't grow up with Leave It To Beaver, but I don't get the sense that it had a lasting cultural impact in the same way as I Love Lucy. It seemed like by the 90's everyone viewed the show as cringe, and the few who quote it don't do so in a way that was endearing.
- jkestner 7y agoIn college you could always find a channel playing Simpsons, Seinfeld or MAS*H reruns.
- mattl 7y agoLaw and Order in some variety.
- jedberg 7y agoI Love Lucy had a much bigger impact 30 years after it started than those shows, but the impact has faded. I'm only 42 and I still quote I Love Lucy all the time, because it was still in constant reruns in the 80s. I think Simpsons might have an advantage given that it's run for 30 years.
- vlunkr 7y agoIMO The Office is up there. It was popular in its day, but it seems to only be growing more popular on Netflix. I think it's still the most-watched show on the platform. And there are tons of memes.
- rbobby 7y agoWith the odd intonations.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- LameRubberDucky 7y agoI wondered what happened. It used to be my go to place for movies but it just kept degrading. Now I go to Fandango.
- sonicxxg 7y agoDid I just travel to an alternative dimension? Moviefone, Fandango? Never heard of any of these names. Are they supposed to be big brands?
- ethagnawl 7y agoYes, I'd say so. These services, in addition to the local (print!) paper, were how you found out when and where movies were playing.
- twunde 7y agoThey were big brands if you went to the movie theater frequently in the 90s and early 2000s.
- smcl 7y agoI think the confused person must live in Europe. I hadn't heard of any of these services and I've lived in UK and Czech Rep ... however over here we're all pretty used to the "ohhh this must be an American thing" feeling so I'm not sure why they're acting all surprised
- projektfu 7y agoThe local paper, especially if you had a free weekly "alternative" paper in your locality, was where you'd pretty much find anything. The great thing, looking back on it, was that it wasn't "customized for your taste" and you could learn a lot by looking at the listings. Unfortunately, the internet wasn't as good at giving information about stuff until about 1993 so you'd have to ask friends if they knew anything about that band with the cool name. The advertising was relevant and nonintrusive. Instead of the whole paper being covered in ads for the new Avengers movie like IMDB, there'd be ads for several of the new releases, some new record releases, bands coming into town, art shows, etc.
- cannam 7y agoI've never heard of Moviefone - can anyone explain why a phone and dialup service is a "relic of the high-flying dotcom days"? Was there an internet component? The article offered me plenty of ads, autoplaying video, and cookie popups, but it didn't quite answer that.
- fullshark 7y agoIt's at the end of the 2nd paragraph.
- tartoran 7y ago"Helios and Matheson went belly-up after accruing unsustainable losses from MoviePass, the now-defunct theater subscription service. Meanwhile, tucked away in the bankruptcy filing was the disclosure that the net book value of Moviefone’s intellectual property is estimated to be $4,379,504. That’s just 1.1% of AOL’s $388 million stock deal for Moviefone in 1999, right before the internet bubble burst."
- cannam 7y agoThat tells me that AOL paid a lot for the company, but it doesn't tell me why, unless I'm missing something obvious (which is quite possible, sorry if so). Did they do anything interesting on the internet, either then or later, or was the deal purely aspirational?
- reaperducer 7y agoOverpaying for an information service is pretty much the definition of 1990's dotcomishness. Today, too.
- gumby 7y agoWho knows if they overpaid? Perhaps they made a profit on it even though it's now worthless. Carriage makers, haberdashers and mechanical accounting machine manufacturers had good profitable businesses at their appropriate times, even if now such businesses are marginal and specialized, to the extent they even exist (not the last one, certainly)
- dvt 7y agoIt would seem trivial to pivot Moviefone into a film rating website. I wonder how difficult it would be to disrupt Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoCheck out criticker, it's awesome. Very simple but effective algorithm using bucketing and similarity scores to identify movies you will like. Find it surprisingly accurate. https://www.criticker.com/ https://www.criticker.com/
- icebraining 7y agoFully agreed; every time I happen to watch a movie recommended by a friend or so, I come up with a score and then check the site's predicted score, and it's always within 5%, usually less! Plus it has recommended some obscure gems, like Branded to Kill.
- riazrizvi 7y agoTrivial? Trivial to build a site, populate it with critic content for each movie, as either text or scores that seem credible to a particular audience type? Or trivial to carve out market share from Rotten Tomatoes/Imdb/Metacritic?
- derefr 7y agoTrivial to use cash-on-hand to buy a small existing movie reviews site and rebrand it.
- squarefoot 7y agoThe real challenge is to build a reliable reviews mechanism, then resist the temptation to sell it to media companies. IMDB moved from a respectable site to a parody of itself for that exact reason: they didn't resist and today their reviews are complete garbage. They got to the point of removing the comments section altogether when users found how to spot fake accounts that were created just to give bogus ratings.
- jdofaz 7y agoI have no fond memories of moviefone, aside from the annoying voice it would make you listen to trailers. The newspaper used to have a free service called pressline that would give me the same info without the annoyances.
- downerending 7y agoSadly, it's not the "You have selected regicide." guy.
- harrisonjackson 7y agoI used to love it when my parents called moviefone when we were headed out on a family outing. Now we book seats through an app that lets us watch trailers and pick the best seats available for any new release - very cool - but I do miss some aspect of moviefone and the even older method of looking in the local newspaper to see the movie times.
- ALittleLight 7y agoI tend to think that the things we do during childhood take on a happy nostalgic glow. Perhaps your parents feel the same way but substituting looking up movies in the paper for "moviefone" and "moviefone" for the app. Your children, in turn, will fondly recall the time when they used an app as opposed to having their movies arranged automatically by their AI assistant, but just like you continue to use the app, they will continue to use the assistant.
- ficklepickle 7y agoAnd his grandchildren will be nostalgic a habitable environment.
- ficklepickle 7y agoAnybody remember "talking yellow pages" or something called "hotline 2929"? It had movie listings as well as some choose your own adventure style games played with the keypad. I'm not sure if it was local, or a Canadian thing or what. I sure spent some time on those games, though. It was also the way we got movie listings. Edit: managed to find a link. It was aka "audiotex". Apparently this was popular for a minute pre-internet, with newspapers also getting in on it. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Collision+course%3A+the+battle+for+revenue+between+newspaper+audiotex...-a011413240 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Collision+course%3A+the+battl...
- wtn 7y agoI grew up in the USA, and My hometown newspaper offered that service. I played the interactive games. I think the content refreshed every week.
- itsthecourier 7y agoGuy decides to change his position to CEO, nobody in HR complains
- GekkePrutser 7y agoOh that's a blast from the past. I used to use this all the time for testing international calls. "Welcome to Moviefone, brought to you by the new york times!"
- triangleman 7y agoAnd Hot 97
- onetimemanytime 7y ago>>Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee I'll never sell!!! My business /idea is worth a gazillion, billion trillion. Things change, cashing in your chips might work sometimes
- williesleg 7y agoKramer, is that u?
- justlexi93 7y ago1% is still $4,379,504 so whoever it is they're apparently doing a pretty good job
- triangleman 7y agoI think it's worth noting that founder Russ Leatherman is still doing well for himself; for instance, he apparently has a syndicated radio spot called "Six Second Reviews".
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoExcerpt: "Meanwhile, tucked away in the bankruptcy filing was the disclosure that the net book value of Moviefone’s intellectual property is estimated to be $4,379,504. That’s just 1.1% of AOL’s $388 million stock deal for Moviefone in 1999, right before the internet bubble burst." Amazing how some companies can devalue faster than Venezuelan currency...
- Traster 7y agoActually, Moviefone lost 99% of it's value in 20 years. The Venezuelan Bolivar's inflation rate was 130,000% in 2018 - or to put it another way, it lost 99.999% of its value in that single year.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoI stand corrected! <g>