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MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

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Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#51

Post by scarface74 »

indecisive_user wrote: post #47
swozey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a city with Alamo Drafthouses and I refuse to ever visit an AMC/Regal/etc after moving here. I'm fine with them making their own monthly payment programs.

Have you been to an AMC lately? The one near me upgraded a lot of their show rooms and though I've never been to an Alamo Drafthouse, they both seem to have a lot of the same features from what I can find. Reserved seating, print e-tickets at their robo kiosk, comfortable reclining seats, full bar with pub food. I know that AD theaters have a lot of niche showings and cool events, but as far as just watching the late…

You don’t have to print out tickets with AMC. You buy the tickets and they scan the QR code on your phone.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#52

Post by copperx »

swozey wrote: post #26
jrs95 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nevermind being tied to one theater chain, I wouldn’t mind being tied to one theater. I go to the same one almost all of the time anyways. And even if I didn’t, there are enough AMCs around that it’s not much of a value add for me to have something that works at different chains.

I live in a city with Alamo Drafthouses and I refuse to ever visit an AMC/Regal/etc after moving here. I'm fine with them making their own monthly payment programs.

Same for me, but the Alamo is 30 mins away from home. When I'm not feeling like driving that much I just go to a Cinemark.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#53

Post by indecisive_user »

adrr wrote: post #28
kosei wrote: post #7

> MoviePass parent Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc. omitted and misstated its financial prospects in press releases when it touted a "sustainable" business model, the shareholders claim in lawsuits filed in Manhattan federal court. Is this for real? Any outsider could have seen that this model was unsustainable from the start, with the business buying tickets at full price and then selling them at an unlimited rate f…

They looked at people's movie habits and wrongly applied that to an "all you can eat model". I'd guess the average person sees 6 movies a year. This is quite common. I worked at a telecom that sold 0.99 unlimited 1-day calling cards and we predicted would spend less than 1 hour on the phone. People spent an average of 2+ hours on calls which made the product lose money. And some people spent all day on the product.

Early adopters to moviepass were mostly movie fanatics that went to the theaters more than average.

They could only ever make money if they convinced the people that hardly every go to the theaters to sign up en masse, but even at $10/month they couldn't get enough of that demographic before their cash ran out.

It's not an entirely dissimilar premise as Netflix. If all of Netflix's users started streaming as much as the top quartile do, they'd probably be in a bind as well with the huge increases in bandwidth and server costs.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#54

Post by indecisive_user »

Fomite wrote: post #15
michaelchisari wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But every industry can be shaken up if you're willing to give things away effectively for free with VC money. I don't know if that translates to proving an industry needs a shakeup.

Exactly. It's easy to "shake up" and "disrupt" an industry by spending VC money like it's going out of style. "People like things given away at below market rates" isn't even a proof of concept.

Alamo Drafthouse is testing its own subscription service and AMC already rolled theirs out.

Now maybe it's just coincidental timing but moviepass certainly proved there's a huge interest in that model of movie tickets.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#56

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #42
devoply wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's similar to how Netflix would never exist had it started out today, because no studio would surrender their back-catalogs to them for pennies. I personally doubt the longevity of Netflix. On it's own it's not much more than a cable channel, like say AMC. Its success depends on producing very good content... it has not mastered this at all. Over time most studios will back out of their deals with it.

> on producing very good content This is not necessarily true. Even moderately good content, catering to a specific audience will suffice. IIRC, NF has loads of user data and behavioural data to help it guide in production. Assuming an average, not fully satisfied consumer subscribes to NF for 1 year, that's 120 $ per consumer. Assume a show that takes 100 million to produce, say 3 seasons. To make the production bre…

Your "Edit 2" math doesn't take into consideration any of the costs for Netflix's infrastructure or employees not related to content production, which is substantial.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#57

Post by drawkbox »

scarface74 wrote: post #49
drawkbox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of customers probably don't mind, but the moment they will mind is when they want to see a movie that is sold out at one of their common theaters and go to another theater not in the same chain. People do tend to use the same theaters except for special runs of movies or when movies are so big that you might need to go to another theater due to sold out showings at your favorites. I could see this non-issue of…

Plenty of customers probably don't mind, but the moment they will mind is when they want to see a movie that is sold out at one of their common theaters and go to another theater not in the same chain. With AMC Stubs A+, you buy the ticket in advance from the app (something you couldn’t do with movie pass). You would know if a movie is sold out. Some of the AMCs have reserved seating where you can choose your seat in…

Yeah, those are nice features, but I was mainly talking about when you check the app or buy the tickets ahead and it is sold out or doesn't have ideal reserved seating left, from there if you want to see it now you have to pay full price without the movie benefit at another chain. This can happen especially on opening nights. We always book our tickets online ahead of time and only go to reserved seating theaters without any service currently, reserved seating is a must for a good experience.

For instance here in AZ we have AMC, Harkins, Regal and Alamo Drafthouses that have common theaters we go to. I'd prefer a service that they all are a part of, but it is probably just a dream, maybe a few can team up on it at least.

I think a third party independent service focuses on the customer more and it seems like it would benefit gaining more customers to theater chains that aren't already locked in customers.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#58

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #31
kosei wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if they falsified their books, that's absolutely illegal. But "they told me their business model was sustainable, and I believed them and gave them my money" doesn't seem like a reasonable argument either. If that's how those investors fund their companies, I've got this nifty bag of magic beans they might be interested in... For $1M, they'll grow $2M in beans, I promise!

> For $1M, they'll grow $2M in beans, I promise! You are reinforcing my point. If you do that, it would be fraud, plain and simple. You would have to pay the investors back and you will spend a couple of years in prison. You can't show up to the court and say, but your honour, they should have known better . Well, you can, but it would not change the court's decision in your favour. Communications with the investors…

The argument we are making is that MoviePass's business model WAS sustainable, it's just that the model was predicated on the very risky proposition that they'd be able to get sweet deals with movie theaters, which didn't happen. Tons of people felt that their model was extremely unlikely to come to fruition, so they didn't invest.

We don't know the full story of what was said, and it is possible the defendants lied about factual content, but right now it just sounds like sour grapes.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#59

Post by kumarvvr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #56
kumarvvr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on producing very good content This is not necessarily true. Even moderately good content, catering to a specific audience will suffice. IIRC, NF has loads of user data and behavioural data to help it guide in production. Assuming an average, not fully satisfied consumer subscribes to NF for 1 year, that's 120 $ per consumer. Assume a show that takes 100 million to produce, say 3 seasons. To make the production bre…

Your "Edit 2" math doesn't take into consideration any of the costs for Netflix's infrastructure or employees not related to content production, which is substantial.

Yes. With other operational expenses taken into account, maybe NF can produce 1000 episodes a year. That is a huge figure by any margin.

Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters

#60

Post by baddox »

indecisive_user wrote: post #47
swozey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a city with Alamo Drafthouses and I refuse to ever visit an AMC/Regal/etc after moving here. I'm fine with them making their own monthly payment programs.

Have you been to an AMC lately? The one near me upgraded a lot of their show rooms and though I've never been to an Alamo Drafthouse, they both seem to have a lot of the same features from what I can find. Reserved seating, print e-tickets at their robo kiosk, comfortable reclining seats, full bar with pub food. I know that AD theaters have a lot of niche showings and cool events, but as far as just watching the late…

Indeed, and I’ve never been to an Alamo Drafthouse, but I’m fairly sure they have nothing that can even touch my nearest AMC which has a true IMAX screen and a Dolby Cinema screen.
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