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Comment by drewmol | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder if the small subset of people who would regularly watch the same movie multiple times in a theater are: (1) movie buffs, highly likely to see a movie even if it can't be the same, and (2) high concession spenders?

If it's not sold out, seems a bit like licensing already built software: (if it's going unused and doesn't cost to on-board new users or otherwise affect higher paying customers, might as well get butts in the seats)

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In my experience people who have access to a theater during their daily work/chores/gym-run/etc. will buy tons of tickets using their account to help get groups in to a movie.

I saw black panther for free thanks to my friend getting like 8 tickets for 6 of us. He had so many tickets he didn't even know where all of them were or how many he had so we found another couple in his car a few days later.

Movie pass just puts on the money on the card, but they're unaware of what you're actually buying with that. You can buy the same movie for a date in the future over multiple days. I'm sure many will try to do the same using up movies they don't care about.

You do know that's fraud, right?

Only if it's an individual doing it. If a startup finds a way to cheat/hack the system, it's called "disruption".

Slightly off-topic but this sentiment always reminds me of the saying “any crime that happens above street-level is called politics”

As the article mentions, the issue isn't that people would watch the same movie multiple times, it's that people would buy tickets and resell them:

"we saw some people turning MoviePass into a cottage industry, standing in front of a theater selling their tickets to Star Wars, or whatever,"

This actually sounds like a pretty reasonable way of cutting down on abuse to me.

Perhaps users were sharing their pass with their friends and they're trying to curb this?

that was my thought too. i go see Star Wars on Monday you go see it on Friday and we share the subscription price.

It would be tough, you can’t sign into a different phone that often, you need to share a physical card, and you need to check in

Or buy the same ticket more than once and hand it to your friend. Hence take a picture of the ticket being a requirement now.

Except MoviePass has no discount on purchasing movie tickets -- they pay full price.

Perhaps MoviePass can make a case to studios or theater chains directly that giving a break to their higher-volume customers might help drive more business overall...

Why would they cut MoviePass in, though? They're a middleman without a clear value add to anyone involved except for "they can lose VC money."

Theaters can cut them in because movie pass puts butts in seats. And theaters make the vast majority of their income from concessions and not ticket sales. Most of the ticket revenue goes back to the studios.

I imagine theaters are reticent to turn encourage people to get on a service that is essentially putting themselves between them and their customers.

If they give discounts and support moviepass, then moviepass could eventually wield enough power to force discounts on theaters or else the theater will get blacklisted.

Right, but how much money do you think it costs to add a MoviePass-like feature to their ticketing system and their phone apps, compared to paying MoviePass a cut? If it really is a revenue-driving system, they can just implement it themselves. Or if they want to do it cross-chain, I bet you Fandango could implement such a functionality pretty easily. The part about developing a service like this that costs money is eating the loss on tickets, not the software engineering. MoviePass isn't a value add to this process. It's like Groupon, which quickly established a market but they had no "stickiness" for consumers and they've been swirling the drain ever since.

Frequent movie viewers talk to, or attend with friends who might not have otherwise gone? You would want to collect attendance data in comparable areas w/ and w/o and have varying degrees of Movie Pass users to validate the effect.

They are making that case now. If they can get discount ticket prices and stop people from abusing the service (like the guy in a post here whose friend buys and gives away tickets) then they might be able to break even.

The “one movie a day” thing becomes moot though after this change. Since there will really be no more than 3-5 new movies a month anyways (outside of big cities at least where you might get indie and foreign films).

That was definitely their plan, (1) burn cash to get enough customers (2) use leverage of large customer base to get deal for lower cost tickets from theaters (3) finally make a profit. A problem is that to really leverage their customers for step (2) they'd have to believably threaten to block their subscribers from using that theater which will also cause some people to leave. In the mean time theaters would only decrease their take by giving them the deal. Not terribly surprised the theaters aren't enthusiastic about the whole company.

Is moviepass able to restrict who charges to the card? When I read about how their preloaded charge card system works, it made me wonder if someone with a square reader could just create a business with the word theaters in their name and charge the value of the ticket while in the theater lobby.

Thats why they're requiring ticket stub photos now. I imagine they also have some auditing tricks to find people using the card at non approved locations based on transaction history.

To get the funds loaded on the prepaid debit card you must check in to the movie on your phone, with GPS turned on, and within 100 feet of the theater, and purchase the ticket within 30 minutes of check-in.

And you're restricted from using one account on multiple phones.

Nothing an emulator on some server can't solve.

Ya, or just take your square reader with you to the theater lobby.

You can take a square reader anywhere. So nothing you said would keep me from stopping by the theater each day on the way home from work.

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