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The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

nytimes.com

91–100 of 245 posts

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really could just have tiered prices 6.99 for weekdays before 5:30, 9.99 after - and say 12.99 at the weekends/holidays. For example my local VUE in the UK I can get a ticket on Mondays for less than $6 full price is $16 I suspect that its the paying up front for a year when a substantial majority of its customers wont goto the cinema

I think you are misreading the business model. The MoviePass price is per month . There is NO cost per viewing. You could in theory see up to 31 movies for your single $10 payment.

jessaustin, I don't often see more than a movie or two per month, but back when I had a MoviePass (before they cut the price so low!), I found myself seeing movies I wouldn't otherwise have bothered to see. When the marginal cost is zero, it becomes a lot easier to drop by a theater and see what's playing, and even walk out if the movie's no good, feeling no sense of loss.

I was paying $40/month for MoviePass, and most months they still lost money and me, and I saw a lot of movies in a theater that I would normally have waited to see at home.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#92
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will eventually be a pets.com of the tech bubble. Something like Tesla or Uber or Blue Apron going belly up.

Tesla and Uber aren't going anywhere. There's way too much invested for them not to secure another tiny drop in the bucket to keep going. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea ("throwing good money after bad"), but that's the reality of what will happen, especially since it will probably be someone else's money as they dilute.

There's a chance Tesla will not exist as an operating company this time next year. Given their published financials, it wouldn't take much at all.

There's a chance Tesla will last a century, and people will point and say see! I told you they weren't going anywhere!

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article implodes when you actually start comparing the scale of what the article is basing itself on to anything else. The US economy will hit $20 trillion in GDP this year. The article is built heavily upon a few dozen IPO listings for just one year. With US business profitability at essentially record highs for all sizes of business, the article is going to comical lengths to present a false headline. If we had…

Looking at the original analysis, it looks like 108 IPOs, where did you get 30? https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/2018/01/IPOs201...

Page 15 shows it’s 30 tech IPOs last year. With 17% being profitable. So 5 or so are actually profitable.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#94

Yeah, I am a bit sad to see those Ofo, limebike, Bird going all out in the streets, they are trying to outspend each other for the winner to raise the price. I just want a sustainable shared transportation system.

Ofo has been free to use for many months now, at least in Dallas. Are they counting on the competitors to all fold and leave them the sole market owner? Such weird economics!

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#95
post #23
post #16

> The king of money-losers, of course, is Amazon, which went years without turning a profit. Instead, it plowed billions of dollars back into its business The key difference with Amazon is that Amazon could choose to be profitable at any time- just raise prices ever so slightly, reducing growth in customer demand, and the stop building out its enormous logistics empire and new businesses. Amazon could have had profit…

Plus Amazon is Amazon. They've essentially been saying to investors for years "sure, we could make more money for YOU, or give YOU dividends, but WE can do better with your money than YOU could." It's worked, of course, enabling them to grow into the gargantuan enterprise they are today. A smaller company without that proven track record wouldn't get such a license from investors for long.

This argument is funny to me mainly because I hear it all the time, about how different they are because they don't want to be profitable. The other thing management is supposed to do is manage cash flow and profit in such a way as to reduce risk (by piling up cash, not too much of course, but just enough...). They also survived the dot com crash because they were thrifty and always kind of cash flow break even.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#96
post #16

> The king of money-losers, of course, is Amazon, which went years without turning a profit. Instead, it plowed billions of dollars back into its business The key difference with Amazon is that Amazon could choose to be profitable at any time- just raise prices ever so slightly, reducing growth in customer demand, and the stop building out its enormous logistics empire and new businesses. Amazon could have had profit…

there is a very solid argument that what Amazon is doing IS an antitrust issue. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#97
post #6

This dude stole my startup idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945451

'MoviePass inspired me to start my $20 bill club where you send me $10/mo and I send you a $20 bill in the mail.'

Hey - that just might work - once you've shown enough traction and proven demand for DollarPass monthly membership subscriptions, then you should be able to go to USA.gov and negotiate a bulk pricing on $20 bills at a sig-ni-fi-cant discount. Plus if you had a payment app so the end user could pay for stuff with the $20, you could show the user ads and charge a fee of every transaction. You could also track their GPS location 24/7 and sell that.

It's all about leveraging and fully monetizing your captive user base!

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#98
Positive cash flow is actually way more important than profit, although you should have both ideally. If you are running a positive cash flow business with good growth and accurate depreciation numbers on fixed assets, you are in a better position than a profitable microbusiness in a small market. Amazon's breakthrough wasn't realizing this, it was realizing how big the ecommerce market was and how to grow to be able to address the whole market using cash flow to invest. They also used a large pile of investment to get there along the way too. (Four negative cash flow years in their history according to this)): https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/08/12/2016/comparin...

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#99
Central banks are pumping out new money in form debt of close to zero interest rates. This is below market rate interest rates if the market would freely choose the interest rate would be higher. The new money flows to automation in startups that makes processes cheaper. Thus the central banks are not creating inflation through salary inflation they are creating deflation through automation. Robots on average replace 5.7 humans. Software is also a form of automation.

Thus the central banks keep printing new money in hope for inflation but the process where the money flows are creating deflation.

Re: The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

#100
post #11

VC bucks creating discounts is about the only form of wealth redistribution we [the U.S.] can count on these days.

Cryptocurrency seems like another.

It allows miners in poorer parts of the world to resell their electricity at massive profit to more wealthy parts of the world.
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