Netflix Co-Founder's Crazy Plan: Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want (bloomberg.com)

Mitch Lowe, a founder of Netflix, has a crazy idea. Through his new startup MoviePass, he wants to subsidize our film habit, letting us go to the theater once a day for about the price of a single ticket. From a report: Lowe, an early Netflix executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company's movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens. MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people's movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics, a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. [...] Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment, lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer.

Comments

We live in a subscription world...

[MikeDataLink]

Recurring revenue is all companies can think about and it is destroying things

Re:We live in a subscription world...

[MikeDataLink]

recurring revenue isn't always bad for the consumer because it's a very predictable item in a budget. For metered items sometimes you have to adjust how much you're spending on this

That's true until you have to have 15 subscriptions for competing services to see the content you want to see. HBO for Game of Thrones, Neflix for Victoria, Disney for Star Wars, etc. This isn't what consumers are asking for.

$$ POPCORN $$

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember folks, theaters make very little if nothing on ticket sales. Most of that goes directly to distributors & media companies, (and middlemen).

Where theaters really make their money is concessions. So hey, why not let in a bunch of people for basically free (nets the theater zero$), in the hopes you'll triple the amount of popcorn & sugar water sales!! To the average Joe they have just 'saved' thirty bucks on tickets & may drop the same into local establishment's fun-food instead. Really.

Re:Ten years too late?

[Zak3056]

We have a drive in outside of Knoxville, and it's fantastic. If you don't want to sit in the car, then park facing backward and sit in the bed of your pickup, or bring those canvas fold-up chairs to sit in. Bring whatever snacks you want to from the outside world, or use the theater's snack bar, where a diner style cheeseburger costs $4.00 rather than spending $8.00 for popcorn at the regular theater that tells you you can't even bring your backpack in because you might have a bottle of water of some candy in it. See two movies (one of which is often a new release... I remember they had Avengers on opening day) for $7.00 a head.

Best movie experience I've had in decades.