The PhD Movie | Hacker News Reader

The PhD Movie

phdmovie.com

92 pointssp33239 comments

I downloaded it last week (strangely enough, I got there by browsing the Stripe website despite being subscribed to the PHD RSS).

For an indie movie, it's really not bad. Yes, it has some terrible, terrible scenes that just don't work - but the majority is actually pretty watchable. There are some good jokes in there, even though I often felt they could have been portrayed better. The character I love most is the professor - he looks and acts exactly as expected from reading the comics :-)

Overall I think most of the script and some of the actors could really shine in a Hollywood do-over of the same movie.

I saw it a few months ago at a screening at my university. It's quite funny, and quite accurate too :). It is definitely an indie production, but that doesn't take away from the fun.

I've liked PHD Comics for a long time. When I first heard that there was a live-action trailer for a movie (a long time ago), I figured it was a joke - some friends got bored and shot a video over a weekend or something. But I watched the trailer and it was really good. I honestly believed that it was too good to exist. I mean, how often does a webcomic get turned into a live action indie movie? Exactly. So I was psyched to see that they finished it and it really exists :)

I've seen the trailer since several month ago, not interested, terrible acting.. But i still love the comics.

The casting is quite faithful to the comics. Though yeah, I don't know about the acting.

I just watched the first half of it and thought the acting was just slightly better than the acting in Act of Valor ("real Navy SEALs!" in a movie about Navy SEALs).

In fairness, the actors are not professionals--they are all Caltech students.

I would actually have bought it for 5$, but seeing 15$ for the download is kind of a bummer.

Louis CK (a pretty well known comedian with his own TV shows) charged 5$ for his evening special in a hassle/drm-free HD download and was pretty successful with it.

I am not quite sure where the sweet spot is, but I think they might be able to reach a broader audience for 5$ :-/

As a point of data, I would pay $8 for this as someone that has never read PhD comics before.

Looks fun.

That's funny. The price for me is 10$... And usually we get things more expensive in Europe.

I'm from Europe (Germany) too, and the streaming is 10$. The "optional download" is an additional 5$

Maybe, but they can always do that down the line. At the moment, they have a dedicated audience that will gladly pay $15.

There's always going to be dedicated people who will pay a particular price. But how many are there?

Isn't the question really: what is the sweet spot, where you get the highest total for 'number of purchasers'*'the price'?

Well, no. Given your number of customers as a function of price D(p), you aren't necessarily trying to maximize p D(p). It's not completely obvious, but in principle you can get ∫ D(p) dp out of those people, if everyone paid what they were willing to pay.

In order to pursue this goal it is very common to make a finer approximation to ∫ D(p) dp by creating several price-points. You see this all the time on Kickstarter for example, "donate some extra and we'll send you a copy of the source code." And one of these ways is "donate some extra and you'll get to see the finished product first," which is one of the solutions given above: charge $15 when it first comes out, then reduce to $5 over time.

That's the theory. In practice, people who think that $15 are too much, will either forget about it (and not come back when its cheaper), or they will pirate it.

That's not practice. It's just your theory. I dislike this rhetorical device.

In practice my theory is right.

(1) As for forgetting, well, good companies often market their price reductions. I mean, famously, Apple released two iPhones in 2007, a 4GB one at $500 and an 8GB one at $600, and rapidly killed the first and reduced the second to $400, after about two months. It made a terrific marketing splash, lots of people bought the $400 one. Granted, this sort of marketing is easy for them because they're Apple and everybody is always listening for news on them, but my point is just that "we're reducing our price!" can be a subject worthy of a new press release and a new Hacker News bump.

You may also remember that so many people criticized them for the above, that Apple gave away $100 certificates to the people who bought at the $600 price point. There is a valid criticism of what I have said above which nobody has yet mentioned: which is that people like to get a "good deal" and think of you better as a company if you provide that to them. As you try to extract out ∫ D(p) dp from people, you are also squeezing a commensurate amount of happiness out of them, and that can be bad for long-term customers.

(2) The top isoHunt torrent lists 20-ish torrenters, so I'm not sure whether piracy is a valid concern on this matter.

There's also a decay function with a roughly exponential envelope that covers the number of people possibly interested as a function of time.

For a documentary that pretty much only appeals to science and engineering geeks, hitting the front page of HN is the peak interest at t=0. Now what. Well it starts decaying. Might go up a bit, but in a week that tail is going to be dominant and the potential sales a minute fraction of those possible TODAY if a sales conversion occurs.

Most films are highly perishable. They don't make a lot after initial interest and excitement wanes as new films are always coming out.

Right now I can buy a couple DVDs I want with shipping for the same $15 of a download of a documentary that people are saying is sort of OK but has slow moments, or I can buy a month's Netflix and realize the real limit is I only have so much time to watch things.

Maybe. It's worth pointing out that the PhD Movie was actually released many months ago, has already screened in many college campuses, and is now receiving a buzz of revived interest from us today. So this isn't t = 0 but t = 1, in the appropriate units.

The DVDs you propose buying are actually probably one of the most successful implementations of this strategy, and the key fact is that sometime a year down the line you say to yourself, "hey, I never got around to seeing that movie, it was too expensive, or they only had it in 3D and 3D makes my head hurt, or any number of other things -- why don't I just buy it at the reduced price on DVD?" It works.

(I'd say it works "very well" but honestly, DVD sales are pretty thinly reported across the industry, so nobody really knows how well it works in terms of hard numbers.)

> At the moment, they have a dedicated audience that will gladly pay $15.

And when they lower the price the other 99.9% of potential viewers will have forgotten all about it and lost interest.

There were more people working on this movie for a lot more time than Louis CK's evening special. Plus, they don't have such high visibility, so they need to make their money back on a lot fewer customers.

I was ready to pay, and then it asked me to put my credit card information into a non-secure page. Looking at the page source, it looks like they use Stripe for payments. Will the credit card details be transmitted encrypted once I press the submit button, or are they transmitting the details in the clear?

The Stripe JavaScript will submit your details over HTTPS. To prevent this very concern (the perception that submitted data will not be secured), sites should serve their forms over HTTPS as well.

Unless someone substituted the javascript served by the page over unprotected HTTP (while it was sent to you). Firesheep already showed that making similar process user-friendly isn't that hard.

HTTPS or not, Stripe accepting credit card data on a site they don't control is extremely worrying.

Having pre-submission pages (or anything leading to the submission of sensitive data) not be over HTTPS is more than just an issue of perception; for example, a network attacker can inject javascript into the unsecure form page and read/send off the credit card details before the form is even submitted.

Since more than one of the replies I me mention this, I'll reply to myself...

It is correct that serving the necessary JavaScript over HTTPS is the Right Thing To Do as it prevents injection. IIRC (I'm on my phone and not where I can research) Stripe serves the JavaScript themselves over HTTPS (you pull their scripts from their server) and this problem is solved.

While I understated the concern about serving forms unsecured, the same MITM problem is a potential issue for the page containing the form. The solution is the same: serve over HTTPS.

If the page is not HTTPS an attacker could inject html to redirect your data a site which is not stripe (say the attackers fake stripe). HTTP stripe forms are not secure.

Was a bit surprised that they didn't ask for founding on kickstarter, seems like the norm these days :)

Would you believe a kickstarter about procrastination to actually deliver? ;)

When the movie was first announced there wasn't even a kickstarter yet. At least not one prominent enough for me to know about and I hang around HN every day.

Considering it is a movie about getting a PhD, I'm surprised they didn't try to fund it through an NSF grant!

I wish they'd have provided a download-only option, but I suppose unlimited online streaming sorta makes up for it.

I'm waiting for the XKCD live action movie

As we know, that's going to be "River Tam Beats Up Everyone": http://www.xkcd.com/311/

Somebody's smoking crack to think $10 is a good price for streaming a documentary no one's heard of, with the option to pay even more for a download.

Don't they teach pricing any more?

I just know these guys are leaving money on the table.

Try $2 for a view, $5 for a download, $12 for a DVD. Assuming you're a world renowned comedian with millions of fans. Anything less, adjust price downward accordingly.

The film is not a documentary, and it's no wonder you haven't heard of it; it's targeted at the audience of the phdcomics webcomic. I assume they don't aim for the mass market, but try to cater to their readers.

If you target a small audience, you need to charge more. $2 might work for mass market, but not for a niche.

It's not a documentary. It's an indie movie based on a webcomic. And I'm sure fans of the webcomic will pay at least $10 for it. And they have much less exposure than a world-renowned comedian, so they have to make some money from fewer customers.

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