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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

I would like to thank all the investors that greatly contributed to my entertainment. It was a fun, and very unsustainable ride, but no regrets.

I'm actually considering the subscription service provided by the big players, so they did change the industry somewhat.

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As someone who didn't have a movie pass I was too entertained watching this whole thing play out. Venture subsidized products are always a wild ride. I miss all my VC subsidized food deliveries.

Same, and I feel that half way through its lifespan I felt I had already missed the boat to get enough out of it.

I also don't go to the movies enough anymore. I watch so much on flights now that more and more things are moved into the "I'll just watch it on a flight in a few months" territory. The flights themselves being pretty cheap or free - subsidized by the merchants that paid for my points.

Eh at least those merchants still made money on it, moviepass basically never made a cent

Keep in mind that movies on flights are sometimes edited and they don't tell you. They especially remove any scenes involving plane crashes.

So you know, you might be missing some critical scenes in some movies. :)

My immediate understanding was that the parent poster was planning to watch the movies on his laptop or something similar. But, I don't fly very often; are in-flight movies a popular option? Genuinely curious.

> But, I don't fly very often; are in-flight movies a popular option?

By the fact that I observe all the people sitting next to me on the plane watch in-flight movies, I'd say they are a popular option.

Some airlines offer complimentary in-flight movies on-demand on the in-flight entertainment system, even in economy.

Haven't most airlines had this for a long time, for any flight over about 5 hours? Or, for any plane bigger than a 737 / A320.

(Or is this just because in Europe... well, because those criteria mean a flight out of Europe.)

Most domestic US flights have the "bring your own device" option now, where you watch on your smartphone with their wifi.

The long haul flights usually have screens.

Since OP said it was subsidized by the airlines, I assumed OP meant as an inflight movie.

parent poster here: in-flight movies are a popular option.

any entertainment I try to bring myself "just in case" really just ends up taking up space/weight and not being used

last decade it felt like a luxury to bring my laptop/device for travel, this decade it is a burden if it happens at all.

>> Keep in mind that movies on flights are sometimes edited and they don't tell you. They especially remove any scenes involving plane crashes.

Huh. Never knew that.

They do tell you. The blurb always states that in-flight movies may be edited for content, even if in fact you're getting an unedited version.

I saw a censored and then uncensored version of Mystic Pizza on the two flights of a round trip with the same airline once. The editing quality is not great; the censored scenes were pretty confusing.

> The blurb always states that in-flight movies may be edited for content, even if in fact you're getting an unedited version.

Which effectively means they didn't tell you. :)

> So you know, you might be missing some critical scenes in some movies. :)

A tolerable risk. Non-US airlines have wildly different criteria for this such that it really hasn't been in issue.

But how would you know if you only ever watched on an airplane?

Some movies I’ve gone on to see multiple times

Other times I was sufficiently entertained and followed the plot well enough to not care

This is why I bring my own copies of Alive, Die Hard 2, and others on flights. It actually helps keep me from being so anxious on flights.

The hill I choose to die on is that Die Hard 2 is better than the original Die Hard.

I enjoy them both equally. I also like Die Hard 3 just as much as the first two. The rest aren’t worth two hours.

3 is my favorite. The addition of Sam Jackson and NYC is just great. I honestly don’t even think about anything beyond the original trilogy.

Why do you think so?

Cooler terrorist plot, bigger action scenes, and more variety in the setting: plane, airport, snowy fields, etc.

> subsidized by the merchants that paid for my points.

Technically, it's paid for by people paying credit card interest and fees, and everyone who doesn't buy things with a credit card, thereby getting nothing for the inflated prices that merchants pass on to you.

Call me ecoterrorist, but hearing "flights are cheap", so we flight makes me angry. Flights should not supposed to be cheap. The whole industry contributes significantly to global warming for you to watch movies.

For a very long time, people have made cheap swipes at Al Gore for using lots of carbon, such as for flying here and there and doing things that rich people do.

And, for a very long time, I thought, well, that's stupid, because global warming is about the total amount of CO2 on the whole planet, not personal behavior and virtue. It's not a religion, after all.

Somehow, everything's reversed, but does this mean that Gore is now a fiend? Or were people right the first time, that it's not about carbon being sinful?

A pound of CO2 is a pound of CO2, isn't it? Every time people make a comment about some specific activity, what I hear is "this pound of CO2 is more sinful than that pound of CO2". Or "everyone should get to emit equal amounts of CO2". I don't think these have anything to do with preventing climate change.

I really, really, don't believe it's wrong or contradictory for "liberal elites" to fly around on their private jets and still try to stop global warming.

But that means I also don't see why people have turned to condemning Joe Blow in the same way. It's not flying that's the problem. You ban flying, and economics would allow the fossil fuel to be burned some other way. You mandate electric cars, or anything else, and you're not doing the one thing we need to do, which is to ration all carbon emissions. All carbon is equal!

Maybe we do need to switch to electric cars or stop flying, but I'm saying we can only find that out by first making emitting CO2 more expensive and then letting the market work. It's not that it's a "nicer" solution that's more "free market", it's that there is literally no other option. We are looking for car keys under a streetlight, when we know they were dropped in the sewer.

In my opinion the “solution” is to just make every pound of CO2 cost, well, its actual cost. It wouldn’t bother me if a factory uses more CO2 than an individual, or even if a meat eater uses more CO2 than a vegan, as long as every party is paying the actual societal cost of the CO2.

And who knows how much longer VC subsidized taxi services will last.

Now you've got me wondering, just how much wealth has been redistributed back to the general public from failed VC backed schemes over the last decade?

Not even close to enough.

I wonder if they knew that it would never work and were just feeling "philanthropic"

I wonder if you could post hoc write it off as a donation to the public, and deduct it from your taxes...

(I mean, I don't seriously wonder this, just hyperbolically)

You definitely can't write off a bad investment as a donation, but you can write it off as a capital loss.

Not sure how active it still is, but there's a site called VC Fund My Life (http://www.vcfml.com/) which catalogs coupons offered by start-ups for growth hacking (likely just VC money).

Let’s get some healthcare startups funded and we can start taking about real money!

They tried already, it was called Theranos and it confirmed that “fake it till you make it” really shouldn’t be applied to healthcare

Sort of.

Theranos did a shitty job being a normal lab and lied about it, a startup that wanted to fake it until they made it could first setup an excellent normal lab, and then with customer consent, run their new lab processes in parallel with the excellent normal lab tests.

I suppose I'm stretching the definition of faking it a little far there, but I think it sort of follows the ethos.

They also had faulty tech and faulty promises and turned to regular labs to do the work they couldn't to try and cover up some of it.

I thought "Theranos did a shitty job being a normal lab and lied about it," addressed that.

There’s doing a shitty job, and then there is killing people with negligence

A lot of it goes into inflated SF and Seattle real estate. Techies are paid near double there to afford to live there. I wonder what scenarios could dry up VC. ZIRP just seems to be driving more money that way.

I saw sooooo many movies :) . Then it fell like the house of cards that it was.

Same here. My wife and I got MoviePass knowing it was liable to go under at any moment, but the deal was too good too pass up. We lived across the street from a theater, so we went all the time. It was such a trip every time we swiped our MoviePass card and it printed the ticket. Unfortunately, the theater only had 5 screens, so we quickly saw everything we were interested in (and the "reach" movies we wouldn't otherwise have seen, some of which were pretty great!)

We eventually moved somewhere that didn't have a MoviePass theater around, and got AMC Stubs A-list for $20/mo, so it definitely changed our behavior.

Same thing here. Over the short 5 months I had MoviePass I would go to the movie theater whenever I would find myself having 2 hours of free time. I discovered a lot of good movies I would never have paid for.

That's true, they did influence things. Important to remember that disruption isn't always profitable: you much just nudge the established players into a higher level of competition.

>Important to remember that disruption isn't always profitable: you much just nudge the established players into a higher level of competition

<Sarcastic/ironic voice> ....while someone else foots the disruption bill....

90% of all startups fail. So yeah that's the model.

>It was a fun, and very unsustainable ride, but no regrets.

Sounds alot like Uber. Pun intended

Same applies to Uber. Thank all the investors for subsidizing our rides.

Wait, if my rides are subsidized, why am I still paying so much??

Did you try paying a taxi? Well that's the "real" cost.

No taxis charged you as a monopoly. Uber charges you on many many more drivers + VC money

They weren't a monopoly. They created artificial barrier to entry (through the medallion system) but the taxi business is super low margin. For a single city you have multiple taxi companies fighting for business. The prices came to an equilibrium close to what it costs to provide a ride.

There is a reason why Uber is losing so much money and why Drivers are barely able to make a living.

"Drivers are barely able to make a living". In my unscientific polling of uber drivers the majority are either doing it to pick up some extra money or in between "real" jobs. Few plan on doing it for a living.

I feel like I've noticed a shift in apparent motivation between 2014 and now. I remember a lot of people talking about doing it as a side gig or whatever in the past, but now I hear a lot about drivers working 8+hr shifts, sleeping in their cars between shifts, commuting from 1-3hr away to drive in SF, etc.

I recently paid under £10 for an 8 mile 55 minute pool across London. There's no way that's sustainable, but whoever's subsidising them makes my life much easier.

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