Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee | Hacker News Reader

Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee

variety.com

219 pointsdanso96 comments

My first thought of course was the Seinfeld episode, which they convenient linked to at the end of the article:

I wonder how much that one person gets paid to basically double check the monitoring. I hope they have another task to keep them busy.

Same. Anytime you hear "movie phone" you immediately have to say, "why don't you just TELL me the name of the movie you'd like to see?"

Literally said that to myself out loud as soon as I saw the name Moviefone.

It proves again that there is a Seinfeld episode for everything.

The other day, I had a conversation with my parents about the cultural impact of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and we couldn't think of any other shows that top them in that way. Old episodes of both shows are still memeable to this day.

Friends.

And to a slightly lesser extent, Cheers (and Frasier).

The whole world watches Friends, but Seinfeld not so much.

Did anyone else not ever like Cheers?

Someone pointed out that Cheers started great but lost its heart when Colasanto (“Coach”) passed away. It obviously lasted a long time, but it transitioned into more of a traditional sitcom.

Maybe some of the early Spongebob episodes; I still occasionally say "These claws aren't just for attractin' mates!"

Can't believe I forgot Spongebob! That's a pretty good example, actually.

The Simpsons have nothing on post WWII tv shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver etc. When there were very few tv channels and after when some tv shows played on repeat forever anytime the networks needed something to fill a slot you’d get something close to saturation of knowledge of characters and situations. Even for wildly popular series like GoT this will never happen again. The consolidated audience isn’t there. For a brief post war moment there was accidentally a TV canon.

If we're talking globally though, I don't think anything has ever had (or will ever have again) the global saturation of The Simpsons. I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver never had international success and existed at a time when TV wasn't as globally popular. Even within the US, Leave it to Beaver never broke into the Nielsen Top 30. Meanwhile in many countries, The Simpsons got the treatment you're talking about. I grew up in Australia, where at least 7 episodes of The Simpsons have aired in primetime per week for almost 30 years, and for half that time most people only had 3 commercial channels. I just checked the TV guide, and it's running from 6:30 PM to 9 PM tonight on network TV and airing 6 episodes throughout the day on cable. If you're under 45, The Simpsons saturated popular culture during your youth, and the same is true for friends and colleagues from around the world. 40 year old Mexicans and 4 year old New Zealanders know the same show in a way that was never true for Lucy or Beaver.

Granted, I didn't grow up with Leave It To Beaver, but I don't get the sense that it had a lasting cultural impact in the same way as I Love Lucy. It seemed like by the 90's everyone viewed the show as cringe, and the few who quote it don't do so in a way that was endearing.

In college you could always find a channel playing Simpsons, Seinfeld or MAS*H reruns.

Law and Order in some variety.

I Love Lucy had a much bigger impact 30 years after it started than those shows, but the impact has faded. I'm only 42 and I still quote I Love Lucy all the time, because it was still in constant reruns in the 80s.

I think Simpsons might have an advantage given that it's run for 30 years.

IMO The Office is up there. It was popular in its day, but it seems to only be growing more popular on Netflix. I think it's still the most-watched show on the platform. And there are tons of memes.

With the odd intonations.

I've never heard of Moviefone - can anyone explain why a phone and dialup service is a "relic of the high-flying dotcom days"? Was there an internet component?

The article offered me plenty of ads, autoplaying video, and cookie popups, but it didn't quite answer that.

It's at the end of the 2nd paragraph.

"Helios and Matheson went belly-up after accruing unsustainable losses from MoviePass, the now-defunct theater subscription service. Meanwhile, tucked away in the bankruptcy filing was the disclosure that the net book value of Moviefone’s intellectual property is estimated to be $4,379,504. That’s just 1.1% of AOL’s $388 million stock deal for Moviefone in 1999, right before the internet bubble burst."

That tells me that AOL paid a lot for the company, but it doesn't tell me why, unless I'm missing something obvious (which is quite possible, sorry if so). Did they do anything interesting on the internet, either then or later, or was the deal purely aspirational?

Overpaying for an information service is pretty much the definition of 1990's dotcomishness.

Today, too.

Who knows if they overpaid? Perhaps they made a profit on it even though it's now worthless. Carriage makers, haberdashers and mechanical accounting machine manufacturers had good profitable businesses at their appropriate times, even if now such businesses are marginal and specialized, to the extent they even exist (not the last one, certainly)

> Perhaps they made a profit on it even though it's now worthless.

Not a profit on 388 million, unless you use that magical "big business/hollywood" mechanic of attributing revenue to things that happened alongside the actual sale. You saw 1 ad for a tv and bought a tv? That's a 600$ attribution to that ad campaign!

They had at least a decade to get revenue and I'm sure they were paid by the studios and the theatres. I don't know the finances but it's well within the realm of possibility.

It was a loss leader to lure subscribers and that was during the wild overvaluation of properties. I'd bet the money I do have, that it made back a fraction of that (without using creative accounting). How many people do you think were influenced to use AOL (as it mentioned in the moviephone recordings "brought to you by AOL") because of moviephone? It's surely 0. Do you think the studios EVER paid for anything moviephone offered? That's a no. Moviephone's online portion (where you could actually order things) was acquired about 2 years after the AOL purchase. It was a dog the whole way, which you can tell by the synopsis on wikipedia (or having lived during the heyday). By 2000, something like yahoo movies was a superior way to get information and order tickets. Maybe they made a bit on The Phantom Menace, but they would often be oversaturated and you would get a busy signal during that time.

I think they thought web traffic was more foundational or sticky. There was this idea of first mover advantage, whoever captured the most traffic could easily sustain it or have it help other services. But maybe it just benefited quarterly results / corporate forces.

It was a phone number you could call to get movie showtimes. It was an automated call system. But I guess it integrated a bunch of data sources together well and had a decent phone-based user interface?

This was a time where the internet wasn't quite prevalent enough to support the idea, but phones were. The idea of calling a phone number for up-to-date movie listings was kind of revolutionary at the time. There was a tech component but it wasn't a dot com and the whole thing is kind of laughable when viewed from today. It was popular enough to have a Seinfeld episode reference it.

They were a service that was uniquely suited to the time of general widespread cellphone usage but pre-smartphone usage. You'd call the Moviefone number and get a phone tree for local theaters and then movie times. They were uniquely positioned to grab people and pitch them a movie at exactly the moment they were trying to find a movie (which doesn't sound revolutionary, but at the time the overall culture of movies and trailers wasn't nearly what it is and people were relying on the local paper for times).

As a result, they were charging millions for ad placements - it's entirely possible that on a cash basis that AOL made their money back from the purchase simply because they were able to bundle advertising packages.

Studios spend stupid amounts of money to promote their movies (look up how much Kevin Hart was paid for single tweets to promote movies).

“Hello! And welcome to Moviefone! If you know the name of the movie you’d like to see, press 1..”

I still remember that.

Jon Stewart used it in his 2006 Oscars intro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfAwXWs0TXQ

and the simpsons parody where Bart is dialing 911 and gets frustrated by the menu and just presses a bunch of buttons.

"you have selected Regicide! If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered press one!"

https://youtu.be/FAsIx3oPY-8

Actually Moviephone predated widespread cell phone usage. It was just seen as a novel AND useful way of getting movie times.

There was no Google, you had to look through the paper and find ads for individual theaters to know where and when movies were screening.

> Actually Moviephone predated widespread cell phone usage.

Also, predated the Web. It was founded in 1989.

> There was no Google, you had to look through the paper and find ads for individual theaters to know where and when movies were screening.

Not so much “look through”, theater listings were on a distinct page or group of pages, depending on the size of the market covered by the paper.

Doesn't quite answer your question, but this was AOL's reasoning at the time [0]:

> In a statement, Bob Pittman, president and chief operating officer of America Online, said: "MovieFone will add an exciting new area of local e-commerce to AOL and our other brands. By putting AOL's resources behind MovieFone, we will substantially enhance its already impressive performance and revenue potential," he added. MovieFone, which is expected to be re-branded after the deal as AOL MovieFone, is one of the nation's largest movie-listing and ticketing services with deal with 17,000 screens in 42 cities nationwide. Dulles, Va.-based America Online also nabs the online version MovieFone.com, seen as a complement to Digital City, AOL's local-listing service.

I read that "dotcom days" sentence to be more in reference to dotcom day valuations than anything else.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150402181940/http://money.cnn....

The reasoning sounds like a very dotcom days reason as well. "We're going to make money on this product because e-commerce and literally any other potential revenue stream possible on the Internet! Do we have a concrete business plan? We don't need one!"

> dotcom day valuations

I still see those bizarre valuations in things like "Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL"

I see all this money thrown around for the chance of profit (but most likely a loss) and I just really wish we had more open source funding. I’d take the job in a heartbeat if I could work full time in open source.

I feel like things like that are a bit of a moonshot.

Interesting, I would like to know how you could turn quoted "17,000" screens into any amount of money that would matter to AOL - by buying MoviePhone.

Most of the money go to studios... theatre operators rely on popcorn and soda sales to survive. So what kind of money can Moviefone make here?

iirc it was advertising aol moviefone in the theaters

That’s giving money to theaters. How does Moviefone make money buying ads?

Sure, but how much money could they make off of it? 17,000 theatres X some # of movie-goers per theatre per month, times 12 months a year, times $money a moviegoer would pay for moviefone ($1?) experience per go... looks like not much money, not for AOL.

There was no internet component to moviefone back then. I think you are narrowly defining "dotcom". It was acquired by AOL, which made it a subsidiary of a "dotcom" which entangled it in the overall dotcom bubble. I think that is fair association. You may disagree, but it's hard to argue that Moviefone did not benefit from the "rampant speculation" of the late 90s.

Another argument one can make is that it is listed as a "Film database" here. So there is definitely a tech component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

And finally, it was turned into a site as well (though I couldn't find a hard date for when that occurred). https://www.moviefone.com/

Dotcom companies flush with cash, high stock prices, or both buying up old-world industries was a hallmark of the late 90s boom, culminating in the same parent (AOL), buying Time Warner. There were many aspirational plays predicated on some kind of synergy between new internet firms and recognizable, established brands.

For what it is worth, history tends to repeat itself and ISPs buying media companies is in vogue again, this time with more clearly defined strategies centered around owning and streaming content libraries.

Dotcom was a buisness landrush/landgrab

Presumably whoever owned petstore.com would become the market leader in all pet products, because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there

The advent of truly usable search engines, not just internet directories, popped this bubble and SEO became critical, until Google modified their adwords bidding market and changed the way buisness happens again

Anyways, Moviephone.com would be the portal for all movie related stuff, a huge industry. Buying it for $100 million dollars is a lot, but owning 95% of the online movie industry would have been huge. In speculators eyes, it could have become the next Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime video... combined.

You were buying the domain name, and all the speculative things you could do with it, as the one stop shop on the internet for that thing.

The guy who owns the NBA team the Mavericks, he owned Broadcast.com which he sold for ~$1.1 Billion. It was supposed to be the radio/audio book version of moviephone.com

> because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there

What a fascinating prediction. Its interesting that these days there is almost nothing useful on these "default" domain names and no user would ever type them in without knowing what was on it. Maybe the landgrab actually caused this since "petstore.com" was always owned by someone hoping to sell it later instead of using it for a legitimate website.

It came true for thesaurus.com– onelook.com/thesaurus is much better but few people have heard of it.

They have better SEO. Whenever you search, thats the first one that comes up. Maybe the URL got it there, its hard to tell.

Im sure there is still use in those and massive benefits on owning a true one-word domain name. Think of the number of people that still pay mo they fees to AOL in the US. In a global context there are millions who don't really know how the internet works - from all the new arrivals (usvisa.com, health.in, ...) to many seniors (recipes.com, taxes.com) to in particular the 8-12 year olds arriving each year in the internet with little conceptual background (boobs.com, homework.com).

But to be clear: moviefone/phone.com is obviously not one of those valuable domains, or at least will quickly sizzle out as the name is not really intuitive and you have to know about it to type it in (equivalent would be movies.com, cinema.com, etc).

That was also the era of the “AOL keyword”, where print and TV ads would literally say something like “in AOL, type the keyword ‘petstore’ to visit us”. They were a namespace where catchy and/or obvious labels sold to the highest bidder. It seemed inevitable that the same marketing teams who’d pay AOL lots of money for “petstore” would think it’s a great idea to buy the same keyword in the (in their thinking) Internet equivalent dotcom namespace.

Anybody remember "talking yellow pages" or something called "hotline 2929"?

It had movie listings as well as some choose your own adventure style games played with the keypad.

I'm not sure if it was local, or a Canadian thing or what. I sure spent some time on those games, though. It was also the way we got movie listings.

Edit: managed to find a link. It was aka "audiotex". Apparently this was popular for a minute pre-internet, with newspapers also getting in on it.

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Collision+course%3A+the+battl...

I grew up in the USA, and My hometown newspaper offered that service. I played the interactive games. I think the content refreshed every week.

I used to love it when my parents called moviefone when we were headed out on a family outing. Now we book seats through an app that lets us watch trailers and pick the best seats available for any new release - very cool - but I do miss some aspect of moviefone and the even older method of looking in the local newspaper to see the movie times.

I tend to think that the things we do during childhood take on a happy nostalgic glow. Perhaps your parents feel the same way but substituting looking up movies in the paper for "moviefone" and "moviefone" for the app. Your children, in turn, will fondly recall the time when they used an app as opposed to having their movies arranged automatically by their AI assistant, but just like you continue to use the app, they will continue to use the assistant.

And his grandchildren will be nostalgic a habitable environment.

I have no fond memories of moviefone, aside from the annoying voice it would make you listen to trailers. The newspaper used to have a free service called pressline that would give me the same info without the annoyances.

>>Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee

I'll never sell!!! My business /idea is worth a gazillion, billion trillion.

Things change, cashing in your chips might work sometimes

Oh that's a blast from the past. I used to use this all the time for testing international calls.

"Welcome to Moviefone, brought to you by the new york times!"

And Hot 97

I wondered what happened. It used to be my go to place for movies but it just kept degrading. Now I go to Fandango.

Did I just travel to an alternative dimension? Moviefone, Fandango? Never heard of any of these names. Are they supposed to be big brands?

Yes, I'd say so. These services, in addition to the local (print!) paper, were how you found out when and where movies were playing.

They were big brands if you went to the movie theater frequently in the 90s and early 2000s.

I think the confused person must live in Europe. I hadn't heard of any of these services and I've lived in UK and Czech Rep ... however over here we're all pretty used to the "ohhh this must be an American thing" feeling so I'm not sure why they're acting all surprised

The local paper, especially if you had a free weekly "alternative" paper in your locality, was where you'd pretty much find anything. The great thing, looking back on it, was that it wasn't "customized for your taste" and you could learn a lot by looking at the listings. Unfortunately, the internet wasn't as good at giving information about stuff until about 1993 so you'd have to ask friends if they knew anything about that band with the cool name. The advertising was relevant and nonintrusive. Instead of the whole paper being covered in ads for the new Avengers movie like IMDB, there'd be ads for several of the new releases, some new record releases, bands coming into town, art shows, etc.

> The great thing, looking back on it, was that it wasn't "customized for your taste" and you could learn a lot by looking at the listings.

This is still a great thing.

do you not go to the movies in the US? Fandango is one of the only ways you can prepurchase tickets - their kiosks are at every theater I've been to over the last ~10 years.

I think many purchase online directly through the theater. I used Fandango until I started using AMC's app directly, since most of the theaters I'd want to go are AMCs.

Canadian here, Fandango's one of those names that you hear and it rings a bell, but chances are you haven't really interacted with them and don't know much about them beyond them being in the ticket sale/resale space broadly.

I've never bothered using them, but in the US everytime I see a movie a Fandago ad gets played, usually for some asian-focused theatrical event

You've traveled to Hacker News, where lots of interesting information from the past and present lies!

Well they were at one point. I'm a bit of a dinosaur, so I was alive before either of these existed. I'm left wondering what people do now. Have an app for each theater perhaps?

Edit: I don't believe sonicxxg deserves any down-votes. After all, everyone doesn't know everything. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

"movies near me" in Google, or look at rottentomatoes.com for good rated movies

I was thinking Google might be it. I do this in Google Maps on my phone, but thought maybe even Google Maps was passe these days.

> I'm left wondering what people do now. Have an app for each theater perhaps?

Google the name of a movie and use the info box that shows you show times near you. Or google "movies".

I only ever see movies at Alamo, so I just use their app.

Moviefone I understand, Fandango less so. The iOS app for example has almost 2M ratings.

Now I just ask Siri. Works great for me.

It would seem trivial to pivot Moviefone into a film rating website. I wonder how difficult it would be to disrupt Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic.

Check out criticker, it's awesome. Very simple but effective algorithm using bucketing and similarity scores to identify movies you will like. Find it surprisingly accurate.

https://www.criticker.com/

Fully agreed; every time I happen to watch a movie recommended by a friend or so, I come up with a score and then check the site's predicted score, and it's always within 5%, usually less!

Plus it has recommended some obscure gems, like Branded to Kill.

Trivial? Trivial to build a site, populate it with critic content for each movie, as either text or scores that seem credible to a particular audience type? Or trivial to carve out market share from Rotten Tomatoes/Imdb/Metacritic?

Trivial to use cash-on-hand to buy a small existing movie reviews site and rebrand it.

The real challenge is to build a reliable reviews mechanism, then resist the temptation to sell it to media companies.

IMDB moved from a respectable site to a parody of itself for that exact reason: they didn't resist and today their reviews are complete garbage. They got to the point of removing the comments section altogether when users found how to spot fake accounts that were created just to give bogus ratings.

IMDb is owned by Amazon (from Apr 1998), which explains the lack of concern about quality user reviews.

Rotten Tomatoes has been suffering the same fate, as it's now owned by Fandango (from Feb 2016).

> IMDB moved from a respectable site to a parody of itself for that exact reason: they didn't resist and today their reviews are complete garbage.

We're IMDB reviews ever good? I used them from fairly early on, but only for actual factual (mostly vast/crew) information, the reviews were always, AFAIR, pretty useless.

Both really, but I meant the latter. People don't really trust Rotten Tomatoes (and IMDb and Metacritic are memes at this point). I'm sure Moviefone's parent company has a few mil to spend.

Maybe you should read the article. The full headline is:

"Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee After Parent Company’s Bankruptcy "

1% is still $4,379,504 so whoever it is they're apparently doing a pretty good job

Sadly, it's not the "You have selected regicide." guy.

I think it's worth noting that founder Russ Leatherman is still doing well for himself; for instance, he apparently has a syndicated radio spot called "Six Second Reviews".

Excerpt:

"Meanwhile, tucked away in the bankruptcy filing was the disclosure that the net book value of Moviefone’s intellectual property is estimated to be $4,379,504. That’s just 1.1% of AOL’s $388 million stock deal for Moviefone in 1999, right before the internet bubble burst."

Amazing how some companies can devalue faster than Venezuelan currency...

Actually, Moviefone lost 99% of it's value in 20 years. The Venezuelan Bolivar's inflation rate was 130,000% in 2018 - or to put it another way, it lost 99.999% of its value in that single year.

I stand corrected! <g>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com