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Comment by Mindwipe | Hacker News Reader

MoviePass doesn't have to raise prices ever so slightly to be a viable business. It has to raise prices by significant integer multiples.

(And heck, Amazon don't even need to raise prices, they could be very profitable just by investing in growth less. But their investors are clearly happy with the current state of affairs).

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Raising prices may even make things worse, as it will just narrow their customer base to those that are most expensive to service.

How are higher-paying customers more expensive to service?

More likely to use their service regularly. At $10 you have a certain percentage which will go once a month. At $50 you only attract the people who go twice a week.

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.

I can't think of a month in which I wanted to see three movies in current release...

If you live in a city with many independent theaters showing limited releases and foreign films, 31 movies per month isn't enough to scratch the surface.

PS. Staff at indie theaters tell me that 70-80% of tickets are purchased with Moviepass cards.

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.

But normal people wont they will see 1 or 2

I live in an area with a cheap cost of living and even if I only went to one movie a month a MP is still about a buck cheaper.

You have to pay for a year up front + another fee

Moviepass is an all you can eat subscription. The UK has those - Cineworld and Odeon both do them. But the point is that they're significantly more expensive than Moviepass is, and the price of quite a few individual tickets (they're usually £35/40pm, which is $50-60 US). And they're run by the chains themselves so they have less infrastructure cost to check for fraud.

That's what I meant by integer multiples. If Moviepass was $60 a month it might be sustainable. But it's not, it's $10.

If the all-you-can-eat subscription is run by the chains they might also be hoping to make back what they lose on ticket sales in concession sales.

Moviepass doesn't get any of that sweet concession stand money and they'd have a hard time convincing theaters that they should unless they start leveraging their user base (i.e. threatening to drop MoviePass from working at Cineplex) to pressure theaters. Even then they add so little value to the system that it'd be hard for them to do that while sustaining a competitive advantage against new market entrants.

MoviePass is just a terrible idea to be in as an independent business.

Cineworld is £18/month, not 35/40.

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