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Comment by rokhayakebe | Hacker News Reader

Excellent. It still baffles me why I have to drive to the movies to pay $10, when I can pay the same $10 bucks at home.

Short story is because people are willing to pay 15 dollars for a movie ticket and willing to pay like 5-6 dollars for an online stream, if that.

Broadcast TV and Netflix have devalued video entertainment at home. A lot of people feel like 10 bucks a viewer is a rip off when netflix is 10 bucks a month.

So why not just offer it anyway, even if most people won't buy? Because movie theaters are the best DRM money can buy. Good CAM's and TeleSyncs are terrible compared to DVD or BlueRay.

Do you have a 20 foot wide screen and top of the line surround sound system at home (not the mention the snacks)? Going to the theater is a much better experience to me than sitting at home.

No, but I also am not surrounded by unfamiliar people talking and texting and even chewing and getting up randomly at my house.. Oh, also being able to pause a movie if needed would be nice

A decent setup can actually be better than a theater. It's not about the size of the screen but the angle of view, which you can achieve at home with either a large TV or certainly with a projector. And these days, a couple going to the movies 20 times (and buying popcorn, drinks, snacks) will easily pay for a big TV or projector plus nice surround system. And you have the benefit of being able to replay scenes, take breaks, turn on subtitles if you can't understand something, not be subjected to 20 minutes of pre-movie advertising, etc. Not to mention those $50 in snacks you can buy yourself for $5 and put the savings you accumulate over time towards improving your home theater setup with better seating, sound and light proofing, etc.

It's a matter of perception. Sitting closer to a smaller 4k screen will give you a better experience than the big badly dimmed screen at the movies. A good pair of quality headphones ($300+) will also sound better than the often too loud sound system in the cinema. I can also set my own EQ and add sound compression to movies where the music, dialogs and special effect are badly balanced.

As for the snacks, they charge double or triple the price of everywhere else on the planet.

The only reason I go to a theater is out of nostalgia. For a while, I thought that 3d would give me a reason to go the the cinema, but I've yet to experience 3d in a satisfying way.

Speakers are much more expensive, but much better than headphones for locating sound.

I'll have to echo aidenn0 here with respect to the sound. I have pretty good headphones (Beyerdynamic T90s) and love them, but when it comes to a movie experience I want a good five-channel speaker setup with proper level calibration and an amplifier that has a home theater EQ profile built in. To me, that's more important than the screen -- I only have a 42" 720p TV, but I'd rather watch movies on it than on 55" 1080p screens with more anemic sound systems. (Granted, my TV is a Pioneer plasma model, so for a 720p screen it's really good.)

I still like going to theaters occasionally, though. For all of the flaws -- including the snack prices, definitely -- sitting closer to a 60" screen at home is not going to truly replicate the effect of sitting twenty feet away from a 720" one.

You probably don't care (neither do I), but the reason the snack prices are so high is because the theater makes almost no money from the movie, in the first few weeks.

My beef is with the quality of the snacks, not the prices themselves.

I am an avid headphone user, but even the highest quality drivers are simply too small to replicate the whole-body bass thump of a good speaker system.

Each to their own.

The cinema experience: get dressed then travel to movie theatre, line up to get expensive ($8-$10 per person) tickets, optional purchase of exorbitantly-priced junk food, try to find good seats (not too close to screen or too near aisle), put up with 20-30 minutes of ads, deal with unwanted noise/light from others, then afterwards file out of theatre and go home.

Streaming experience: Pay $5 for everyone, eat/drink whatever you like, pause whenever you like, no risk of distractions from others (choose friends accordingly), comfy and clean seats.

Even with my relatively modest setup (50" 1080p television and 2.1 sound), I'd go with the latter option almost every time.

My home cinema system (Onkyo amp, B&W 68X series speakers and Rel Quake sub, 40" flatscreen - sorry, slight brag there) is a far superior experience compared to any of my local cinemas. I've stopped going to the cinema because they mostly sound and look awful and the stuff I want to see is always on the smaller screens anyway. Add to that, I also broke my coccyx which never healed properly so I find sitting on cinema chairs deeply uncomfortable after about an hour.

Also my snacks are way better, you don't get to munch on a curry and wash it down with a nice Chilean Malbec in the multiplex :)

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