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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.
Don't you have to watch 15 minutes of ads a the theater anyways? How about just go to bittorrent or pay the money.
Surely if you are off the demographic that is willing to sit through 20 minutes of advertising in order to get a free/cheap movie, you are the kind of person who has no money to buy whatever shite the adverts are trying to sell you?
I guess I'm going to record myself being VERY interested for 15 seconds and just perfectly loop it.
It's revolutionary, I call it a "Job".
I will therefore give them a big middle finger while I forego watching any of their stinking ads.
Record yourself "paying attention" to a video for 15 minutes one time, and point the webcam at a laptop playing the recording to "verify" that you're watching their new ads going forward?
Watch 20 minutes of ads for the privilege of watching 20 minutes of ads.
Pass.
You forgot the 2 hours of product placements in the movie ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
We hire people in China and India to use VPNs to watch the commercials for $0.19, then we sell the movie tickets for $4.99 each! I figure with Square/Paypal overhead, we should clear a solid $4.50 per ticket!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Alongside the 2 hours of bullshit that is the movie.
Beware of the Leopard.
Can I pay the regular ticket price and avoid ALL of the advertisements?
Didn't think so.
How this type of scheme could be worth a free movie ticket is beyond me. But, I suppose some people will do anything.
Anyway... yep... Black Mirror season 1 episode 2 "Fifteen Million Merits" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Until "Stacy Spikes" [who?] can convince advertisers that there's premium value in ads force-fed to a population that gets increasingly good at pretending to pay attention to them while doing something else altogether [yes, dear...]
Now we know where all those heads can go when all the stores are shutting down.
This was covered in the dystopian future in Black Mirror S01E02. Forced to watch ads from your box.
Ugh. Do not want.
Jokes on you. I've legally changed my real name to 'Anonymous Coward' and am filing suit for identity theft against /.
Or associated toys/merch for movies set in fantasy worlds.
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
How soon until friend proxy is a thing too? I need friends to go to the movies with.
Ha hah ah ho ho h o ho ho ho...
How many times has Facebook said this. I think at this point, it's agame for them to see if they can get away with it "just one more time!"
Of *COURSE* this app will violate your privacy. It's just a question of how much.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
can you really trust them to give you a ticket after all, it is still moviepass? sounds like another bait and switch scam to me.
Don't worry, you can probably just play a video of you paying attention to the phone and it'll take in place of you actually watching the ad.
The low tech version:
- Hacked android / app, piping the content of a pre-recorded video into the video input of the app.
(In a couple of months, they'll try various way to fingerprint the input to detect if it's in a loop, clever users will trivially bypass these checks, just by flipping random pixels / adding noise).
The high tech version:
- teleprompter-style two-way mirror like the ones used by every single youtuber.
Except that instead of youtube, the camera is actually the android app playing the add (with a dummy cable in the audio jack, so it doesn't actually play the sound)
And instead of the script, your normal activity is visible on reflected prompter image.
-----
Almost fool-proof until they decide to exclusively only display interactive ads (the kind where you need to play a mini-game to "complete" the ad - usually for a sort of enforced demo-trial games).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Pandering to the cheapskates doesn't make sense. However, the ad-mongers are desparate for funding right now since a recession is looming.
the ad-mongers aren't the only desperate.
If someone is that cheap, then why are they not fetching an ad-free copy from BitTorrent?
The main point of all these attempts at cheap tickets etc. is to try to get people out of BitTorrent (or Netflix/Amazon/whatever/wtfbbqlol) and *back into* the movie theaters.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're absolutely right, and when I learn how to use my mod points, I'll mod your comment up!
It does seem these days that companies are obsessed about getting as many clicks or eyeballs as possible without actually considering who is clicking or... umm... eyeballing.
The only real reason for spending money on advertising is to sell something. Surely you can work out roughly how much money people have got to spend by looking at what they'll do to save money? So... 20 minutes watching ads for a £5 cinema ticket, plus the 10 minutes of 'admin' time to register and all that crap basically puts the audience for this app into the "no money", "on benefits" or "minimum wage" categories at best.
And which company's business model is to specifically target that demographic?
Funny. I was playing a video game on my phone while i had the slashdot page up on my desktop computer.
Both screens were front of my face. If the phone screen was to do facial recognition I would have no doubt that it would think that I was looking right at it, while my eyes were actually focused on the monitor 18" behind it.
So unless the facial recognition is so good that it can see what depth the eyes are focused at, I don't see this as a particularly difficult thing to thwart.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
"Privacy is a top concern" is exactly the kind of thing that people unconcerned with privacy say.
This is an evil product.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/