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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Well, there are two issues as I see it:

1. Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore, so making people wait months to see a new film means they're going to try to find a way to see it sooner. If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.

2. People like me who are on extremely limited bandwidth connections can't watch anything in high fidelity via something like Netflix. Need a way to buffer the whole movie locally ahead of time. Let me queue it up the night before so I can watch it when I get home from work and you'll have my dollars.

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> Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore, so making people wait months to see a new film means they're going to try to find a way to see it sooner. If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.

Aside: Saw Pets with my kids this week; Large Soda is now more than a Bud Light at a Football game ($8). Consider me among those who would gladly stop going to the theater.

It always amazes me how people talk about theater snacks like they're mandatory or something. How about just......don't buy them?

Well to be fair, I think many people consider the snacks (soda, popcorn, candy) to be part of the movie going experience so it's hard to resist the urge to splurge. You're not wrong but there is a lot of years of marketing and persuasion behind "lets all go to the lobby..."

How about just......make that policy about not permitting outside snacks go take a hike?

People are made to throw food and beverages in the trash, if they haven't been purchased at the theater's concession stands.

When the ushers take your tickets, they make you throw away anything that's obviously not sold in the theater, thus monopolizing local refreshments.

Just find a theater staffed exclusively by bored teenagers who don't enforce the policy :)

That's my strategy..

Lots of people just sneak in their own sodas. This is discouraged by authority, but it doesn't seem immoral. At least, it isn't more immoral than going without soda entirely, so long as one doesn't throw the empties on the floor.

I actually carry a big purse when I go to the movies to keep everyone's snacks and drinks from the dollar store down the street, just for this reason. If the movie theater's snacks/drinks were reasonably priced, I would consider forgoing the dollar store and just buy it there to save time.

Keep in mind some theatres threaten an up to $1,000,000 fine for bringing outside food into the theatre. Silly, but I guess they feel it undermines their services?

I'd love to see that hold up in court.

This is why I have the AMC MoviePass and go to theaters which don't care if I bring in a can of my own soda. Even the cheaper theaters want $5+ for the smallest soda. That's just ridiculous!

> Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore

Box office sales have generally increased over the past 20+ years. Possibly people in your peer group may not, but this does not seem correct. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/ http://www.the-numbers.com/market/

According to your link to box office mojo, number of tickets sold peaked in 2002, and has been declining since then, even as population has been rising.

In 1995 0.20 theatre tickets were sold per person in the world.

In 2016 slightly less than 0.13 tickets were sold per person.

This highlights 3 things.

- In the grand scheme of things most people in the world don't go to movie theaters and never have.

- Less do than ever before both in absolute terms and proportionally.

It seems unlikely that steadily raising the cost of tickets and food is going to be a sustainable way to avoid falling revenue in the future.

The smart money ought to be giving people the movie experience they want at home and giving people a higher quality experience out with a higher price tag.

The former will obliterate a lot of theaters and the latter is a smaller scale demand than the existing industry.

> If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.

That's the problem that Sean Parker is hoping to address with his proposed streaming service[1]. At $50 a movie, that doesn't seem unreasonably priced. Until then, though, there's always the Prima Cinema option[2], but then you're looking at $500 a movie, plus $100k+ for the the initial setup, so it's not a great choice if you're impoverished.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/sean-parker-streaming-rental-... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/prima-movie-2016-4

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