Slashdot Mirror
New App Gives Free Movie Tickets To People Who Watch 15 Minutes of Ads (indiewire.com)
MoviePass's original founder and CEO is launching a new company, reports IndieWire, "to score viewers movie tickets for the low, low price of sitting through 15 to 20 minutes of advertisements."
Before you point out that everyone already does that when they watch trailers in the theater, know this: PreShow wants to utilize facial recognition and track how much attention you're paying to each ad. "If it weren't for facial recognition, I don't think we could still do it," Stacy Spikes, PreShow's founder and chief executive, said in an interview with CNET last week. "If not, they could game this all day long."
Here's how it works, per CNET: "Forgoing a password, PreShow's app will only unlock with your phone's facial recognition technology. And while you're watching the ads to earn that free ticket, your phone's camera monitors your level of attention. Walk away or even obscure part of your face? The ad will pause after five seconds."
It's being launched through a Kickstarter campaign, which describes PreShow as "the first ad-supported moviegoer network," saying that the service will be available this July. It also promises that the ad content "is high quality, entertaining, and is an entertainment value in and of itself..."
And though it monitors your face, "Privacy is a top concern. Nobody is recorded, no personally identifiable data is shared, all data is aggregated and anonymized to brand partners."
Here's how it works, per CNET: "Forgoing a password, PreShow's app will only unlock with your phone's facial recognition technology. And while you're watching the ads to earn that free ticket, your phone's camera monitors your level of attention. Walk away or even obscure part of your face? The ad will pause after five seconds."
It's being launched through a Kickstarter campaign, which describes PreShow as "the first ad-supported moviegoer network," saying that the service will be available this July. It also promises that the ad content "is high quality, entertaining, and is an entertainment value in and of itself..."
And though it monitors your face, "Privacy is a top concern. Nobody is recorded, no personally identifiable data is shared, all data is aggregated and anonymized to brand partners."
It sounds exactly like showing up at the scheduled time for any movie in the theater.
1) Take a picture of your face
2) Print it on a color printer
3) Put it in front of your phone, start the app
4) Come back 15 minutes later
5) Go see a movie for free
So they'll throw a bunch of adds that the people wanting free tickets will have to watch. I bet that will be before the set of ads that is normally played because the theatres aren't going to give up that revenue, especially in the first couple of weeks a movie plays when they get almost nothing (~10%) of ticket sales. Then there's the 15 to 20 minutes of trailers that show us the only good parts of movies that will be on a year from now and if we're lucky those scenes will actually be in the movie.
And if we buy the movie for home use we're stuck not being able to skip past through the FBI and anti-piracy warnings and sometimes even the trailers too. Wonderful if you are watching a ten year old movie on DVD and want to see trailers for movies that came out even before then.
Then they break up the streaming sites into almost 20 sites by the time Disney and all the new ones get introduced. Each one with it's own unique content so you have to subscribe to a whole bunch of them to get what you want. Just like cable and having to get a bunch of packages leaving you with a huge bill every month.
And the corporate big wigs wonder why people turned to downloading content. /rant