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I'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?

• fullshark 7y ago
  It'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 $388 million stock deal for Moviefone in 1999, right before the internet bubble burst."
  • cannam 7y ago
    That tells me that AOL paid a lot for the company, but it doesn't tell me why, unless I'm missing something obvious (which is quite possible, sorry if so). Did they do anything interesting on the internet, either then or later, or was the deal purely aspirational?
    • reaperducer 7y ago
      Overpaying for an information service is pretty much the definition of 1990's dotcomishness. Today, too.
      • gumby 7y ago
        Who knows if they overpaid? Perhaps they made a profit on it even though it's now worthless. Carriage makers, haberdashers and mechanical accounting machine manufacturers had good profitable businesses at their appropriate times, even if now such businesses are marginal and specialized, to the extent they even exist (not the last one, certainly)
        • Supermancho 7y ago
          > Perhaps they made a profit on it even though it's now worthless. Not a profit on 388 million, unless you use that magical "big business/hollywood" mechanic of attributing revenue to things that happened alongside the actual sale. You saw 1 ad for a tv and bought a tv? That's a 600$ attribution to that ad campaign!
          • gumby 7y ago
            They had at least a decade to get revenue and I'm sure they were paid by the studios and the theatres. I don't know the finances but it's well within the realm of possibility.
            • Supermancho 7y ago
              It was a loss leader to lure subscribers and that was during the wild overvaluation of properties. I'd bet the money I do have, that it made back a fraction of that (without using creative accounting). How many people do you think were influenced to use AOL (as it mentioned in the moviephone recordings "brought to you by AOL") because of moviephone? It's surely 0. Do you think the studios EVER paid for anything moviephone offered? That's a no. Moviephone's online portion (where you could actually order things) was acquired about 2 years after the AOL purchase. It was a dog the whole way, which you can tell by the synopsis on wikipedia (or having lived during the heyday). By 2000, something like yahoo movies was a superior way to get information and order tickets. Maybe they made a bit on The Phantom Menace, but they would often be oversaturated and you would get a busy signal during that time.
    • appleshore 7y ago
      I think they thought web traffic was more foundational or sticky. There was this idea of first mover advantage, whoever captured the most traffic could easily sustain it or have it help other services. But maybe it just benefited quarterly results / corporate forces.
    • dave_sullivan 7y ago
      It was a phone number you could call to get movie showtimes. It was an automated call system. But I guess it integrated a bunch of data sources together well and had a decent phone-based user interface? This was a time where the internet wasn't quite prevalent enough to support the idea, but phones were. The idea of calling a phone number for up-to-date movie listings was kind of revolutionary at the time. There was a tech component but it wasn't a dot com and the whole thing is kind of laughable when viewed from today. It was popular enough to have a Seinfeld episode reference it.
    • michaelbuckbee 7y ago
      They were a service that was uniquely suited to the time of general widespread cellphone usage but pre-smartphone usage. You'd call the Moviefone number and get a phone tree for local theaters and then movie times. They were uniquely positioned to grab people and pitch them a movie at exactly the moment they were trying to find a movie (which doesn't sound revolutionary, but at the time the overall culture of movies and trailers wasn't nearly what it is and people were relying on the local paper for times). As a result, they were charging millions for ad placements - it's entirely possible that on a cash basis that AOL made their money back from the purchase simply because they were able to bundle advertising packages. Studios spend stupid amounts of money to promote their movies (look up how much Kevin Hart was paid for single tweets to promote movies).
      • briandear 7y ago
        “Hello! And welcome to Moviefone! If you know the name of the movie you’d like to see, press 1..” I still remember that.
        • CalChris 7y ago
          Jon Stewart used it in his 2006 Oscars intro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfAwXWs0TXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfAwXWs0TXQ
        • chasd00 7y ago
          and the simpsons parody where Bart is dialing 911 and gets frustrated by the menu and just presses a bunch of buttons. "you have selected Regicide! If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered press one!" https://youtu.be/FAsIx3oPY-8 https://youtu.be/FAsIx3oPY-8
      • subpixel 7y ago
        Actually Moviephone predated widespread cell phone usage. It was just seen as a novel AND useful way of getting movie times. There was no Google, you had to look through the paper and find ads for individual theaters to know where and when movies were screening.
• jahlove 7y ago
  Doesn't quite answer your question, but this was AOL's reasoning at the time [0]: > In a statement, Bob Pittman, president and chief operating officer of America Online, said: "MovieFone will add an exciting new area of local e-commerce to AOL and our other brands. By putting AOL's resources behind MovieFone, we will substantially enhance its already impressive performance and revenue potential," he added. MovieFone, which is expected to be re-branded after the deal as AOL MovieFone, is one of the nation's largest movie-listing and ticketing services with deal with 17,000 screens in 42 cities nationwide. Dulles, Va.-based America Online also nabs the online version MovieFone.com, seen as a complement to Digital City, AOL's local-listing service. I read that "dotcom days" sentence to be more in reference to dotcom day valuations than anything else. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150402181940/http://money.cnn.com/1999/02/01/deals/moviefone/?iid=EL https://web.archive.org/web/20150402181940/http://money.cnn....
  • xmprt 7y ago
    The reasoning sounds like a very dotcom days reason as well. "We're going to make money on this product because e-commerce and literally any other potential revenue stream possible on the Internet! Do we have a concrete business plan? We don't need one!"
  • Razengan 7y ago
    > dotcom day valuations I still see those bizarre valuations in things like "Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL"
    • TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      I see all this money thrown around for the chance of profit (but most likely a loss) and I just really wish we had more open source funding. I’d take the job in a heartbeat if I could work full time in open source.
    • james_s_tayler 7y ago
      I feel like things like that are a bit of a moonshot.
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• sampleinajar 7y ago
  There was no internet component to moviefone back then. I think you are narrowly defining "dotcom". It was acquired by AOL, which made it a subsidiary of a "dotcom" which entangled it in the overall dotcom bubble. I think that is fair association. You may disagree, but it's hard to argue that Moviefone did not benefit from the "rampant speculation" of the late 90s. Another argument one can make is that it is listed as a "Film database" here. So there is definitely a tech component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL And finally, it was turned into a site as well (though I couldn't find a hard date for when that occurred). https://www.moviefone.com/ https://www.moviefone.com/
• awad 7y ago
  Dotcom companies flush with cash, high stock prices, or both buying up old-world industries was a hallmark of the late 90s boom, culminating in the same parent (AOL), buying Time Warner. There were many aspirational plays predicated on some kind of synergy between new internet firms and recognizable, established brands. For what it is worth, history tends to repeat itself and ISPs buying media companies is in vogue again, this time with more clearly defined strategies centered around owning and streaming content libraries.
• hadlock 7y ago
  Dotcom was a buisness landrush/landgrab Presumably whoever owned petstore.com would become the market leader in all pet products, because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there The advent of truly usable search engines, not just internet directories, popped this bubble and SEO became critical, until Google modified their adwords bidding market and changed the way buisness happens again Anyways, Moviephone.com would be the portal for all movie related stuff, a huge industry. Buying it for $100 million dollars is a lot, but owning 95% of the online movie industry would have been huge. In speculators eyes, it could have become the next Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime video... combined. You were buying the domain name, and all the speculative things you could do with it, as the one stop shop on the internet for that thing. The guy who owns the NBA team the Mavericks, he owned Broadcast.com which he sold for ~$1.1 Billion. It was supposed to be the radio/audio book version of moviephone.com
  • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    > because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there What a fascinating prediction. Its interesting that these days there is almost nothing useful on these "default" domain names and no user would ever type them in without knowing what was on it. Maybe the landgrab actually caused this since "petstore.com" was always owned by someone hoping to sell it later instead of using it for a legitimate website.
    • crazypython 7y ago
      It came true for thesaurus.com– onelook.com/thesaurus is much better but few people have heard of it.
      • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        They have better SEO. Whenever you search, thats the first one that comes up. Maybe the URL got it there, its hard to tell.
    • pergadad 7y ago