I Think I'll Pass

Scott Hardie | June 28, 2011
A new business called MoviePass (I can't think that without hearing Milla Jovovich's voice) is soon to allow filmgoers to see unlimited movies in theaters for $50/month. This sounds targeted towards hardcore movie fans, also known as young people with disposable income. The limited pass, $30 for up to four titles in month, is likely a better deal for most people if they can make it to the theater once a week; it's essentially buy-three-get-one-free. Would you sign up for this service? Would you have been more likely to sign up for this service before Netflix came along?

Scott Hardie | June 28, 2011
For what it's worth, the idea of seeing several movies each month reminds me that I've been considering launching a "book club" or "movie club" discussion format on the site for a while, based on Erik's good idea once upon a time. I vacillate between thinking that our recent participation level is so low that it would be a fruitless endeavor, and thinking that I need to try more things like it in an effort to boost participation even if some of them don't work out. If you have interest in such a thing, please let me know.

Erik Bates | June 29, 2011
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Jon Berry | June 29, 2011
I'd do it if i lived closer to theaters.

Scott Hardie | June 29, 2011
If I was to do a movie club, here or otherwise, it would probably be Netflix-based. It's just too expensive to go to movies any more. We like to go to the nearby mall, walk around for exercise, window-shop for fun, have a cheap dinner out in the food court... but then we get to the theater, where a show costs $19.50 before any 3D or IMAX surcharges. There's a second-run theater across town that we much prefer, $4 for two tickets, but their selection and showtimes are even less appealing. Bah.

There are a lot of problems facing the movie exhibition business, but the biggest might be that the perceived value has not kept pace with the sharp increase in prices over the last couple of decades. Studios thought they could offset declining revenue by raising ticket prices, but those runaway increases are driving even more people away from the theater, and accelerating the rate of technological innovation that lets people watch movies much less expensively on their own time. Exhibitors are caught in the middle, making very little money but trusting in the studios' claims that their investment in ever-more-desperate advances in technology (IMAX! 3D! Smell-o-vision!) will save the business. The position that exhibitors are in right now reminds me of farmers, who had a very successful business model that worked for many generations, but who faced challenges in a shifting economy and were convinced that they needed ridiculously expensive machinery (and pesticides) that they managed fine without before, but which forced them to seek greater and greater income just to pay off. Meanwhile, Amish farmers reap a fortune with minimal investment in machinery and chemicals, just by sticking to common-sense methods that have worked for ages. I doubt the government is going to rescue the film business with subsidies, but who knows.

Erik Bates | June 30, 2011
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Samir Mehta | June 30, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 1, 2011
I like all of those things too. Our home "theater" sucks. I like sitting up close to the big screen and being immersed and losing myself in the picture. I want to see The Tree of Life and get *really* lost.

There are plenty of nitpicky complaints about going out to the movies, and having to see it at the theater's showtime is a big one for us, but really it's just about cost. There are lots of good movies out in the winter, but the rest of the year, there just aren't many titles worth twenty bucks. In a summer full of robots punching each other, Kevin James taking a gorilla to a chain restaurant, and generic third-tier superheroes getting their own "franchises," a mediocre little drama like Larry Crowne looks practically Oscar-worthy.

Lori Lancaster | July 1, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 1, 2011
So much for MoviePass. For now, anyway.

Lori, if I had that setup, I'd be a lot more happy to watch movies at home. :-)

Lori Lancaster | July 2, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 12, 2011
Well, I was thinking about a Netflix-based movie club here, but maybe not after today's news. I don't blame Netflix; their hands are tied by movie studios who refuse to license content at a reasonable rate. But I get why people would react badly to the price hike. Three out of four people I discussed it with plan to cancel their subscriptions.

Samir Mehta | July 12, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 13, 2011
There are lots and lots of people angry about this, the more I read. And some apologists like me who blame the studios, even though Netflix didn't mention that reason at all in their announcement. At first I didn't get Netflix's claims that "there is still a very large continuing demand for DVDs" and "DVDs by mail is a long-term business for us," since that runs contrary to pretty much everything Reed Hastings has said about the company's future for at least half a decade now. But it does make sense for them to retreat back into the DVD business, if studios are indeed refusing to license their content for streaming unless Netflix pays exorbitant fees. So, customers willing to pay the higher rate can keep their streaming business afloat with the few studios who will play ball, while many other people stick with DVD-only. Those who will go with both DVDs and streaming are icing on the cake. The plan does make some sense, but the shitstorm of controversy about how it was disclosed to the public is going to hurt them badly. They may enjoy something like 65% market share now, with the next largest streaming provider having something like 5%, but RIM enjoyed that kind of dominance just a few years ago and nobody wants Blackberries now.

Samir Mehta | July 13, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 13, 2011
I'm skeptical too. If this really is their plan and they did anticipate this level of backlash, then it seems like a lousy plan. They haven't faced this kind of criticism before, so I wonder if there will be a retraction or other change in the next week or two.

Denise Sawicki | July 13, 2011
For those of us without fast enough internet to stream movies in the first place, the price is actually decreasing.

Erik Bates | July 13, 2011
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Lori Lancaster | July 13, 2011
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Scott Hardie | July 14, 2011
We're on the fence. Kelly used streaming almost exclusively and didn't touch her discs, so we reduced to one-disc-at-a-time for those titles that I wanted to see that just weren't available in streaming yet, or wouldn't be for a long time. The problem is, it's getting to the point where *I* don't really touch the discs either. It took me three sittings last week to get through Harry Potter and the Endless Finale: Part 1 -- thank you Warner Bros. for forcing me to sit through the same parade of unskippable trailers every time I fired up the disc -- and that was after weeks of nagging myself mentally to watch it or return it. A lot of movies are like that. TV over the Internet has so reduced my attention span for passive entertainment, and other demands on my time have so limited how long I have to give anyway, that the once-incredible price of $8/mo for unlimited movies now seems kind of like a waste of eight bucks. This state of affairs makes me sad. Louis CK is right that everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy.

For what it's worth, here's a defense of the change in Netflix's pricing that puts it in perspective. I'm skeptical that the division into two price categories was done to prove to content providers how many customers prefer to stream -- simple usage analytics of the existing program would have told that story quickly and accurately -- but mostly it's a smart argument. Like any entertainment, the outrage over Netflix's new prices comes down to perceived value, and our wallets being so pinched these days makes it that much harder to perceive any value.

Denise Sawicki | July 18, 2011
Anybody who would care very likely knows this already, but funimation.com has all their anime streaming for free all summer. Could be an option for people pissed about price hikes I guess. We just discovered this and spent the weekend watching Claymore. I am not sure how much of their stuff was free normally, but certainly not this much.

I guess I have to take back what I said about us not having fast enough internet for streaming video. We only have 512 k but can *sometimes* watch a full show without any forced pauses... looks entirely good enough for us in full screen mode on our TV, too.

Then again, you probably have to take what I say about technology-related issues with a grain of salt, since I fondly remember spending like an hour loading Tunnels of Doom from a tape recorder onto our old TI 99/4A computer and I would probably do it again if I still had the system :P

Erik Bates | August 19, 2011
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Scott Hardie | August 20, 2011
That makes a lot of sense. Isn't Redbox $1/day? Do you pass by the machine on your route the day after rental or do you have to make a separate trip? There's a Redbox unit in the grocery that we visit every Friday night, but I wouldn't want to drive all the way back every Saturday.

Erik Bates | August 20, 2011
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Scott Hardie | September 19, 2011
Ugh. Here we go again.

For years, Netflix was the company with the golden touch, who inspired millions of customers like me to evangelize on their behalf by putting customer satisfaction first. Their price change of a few months ago was their first really big PR disaster, in which they alienated about a million customers into leaving, and did it all through uncharacteristically poor customer communication. So today, while the wounds of a few months ago are still raw, judging from all the comments here and elsewhere I've seen by people dropping the service over the last few weeks -- NOW is the time that they choose to announce a split in the company, so that you have to pay two companies for two services? And by the way, all of your queue and rating data will not transfer to the new site? And they decide to announce this aggravating news in the midst of apologizing for the LAST aggravating news, saying they learned from their mistake when they manifestly have not learned anything? What the fuck is the matter with these people?

"Baby, I messed up. I know you got mad when you saw me with that other woman. I'm sorry I hurt you, and I love you. By the way, I'm moving in with her."

Yeah yeah, I get why they're doing it. And it is a pretty smart business decision. After all, most companies avoid making changes that will piss off their customers, and consequently they slowly become obsolete. Netflix isn't afraid to make the painful changes necessary to survive, and I can applaud that.

I just don't understand their sense of timing. NOW they do it? Either they had a September split in mind four two months ago, and they introduced the divided pricing then to prepare people for the split, which was a disastrous idea that caused much more pain than there would have been if they'd just split the company then -- or the September split has come together in the last four two months, and they cluelessly decided not to wait another 6-12 months for the bad PR and hurt feelings to blow over. Either way, they're idiots.

I have no idea yet what Kelly and I will do. If our data would port from Netflix to Qwikster, I would be more tempted to use both: I love their very prescient recommendations engine, which is based on the 4,428 ratings that I've recorded over the last ten years, but there's no way in hell I'm going to re-rate all of those titles on a new site. I love being able to rent almost anything on disc much more than I actually get around to watching anything on disc; what little viewing I do any more is almost exclusively TV shows due to lack of time, and I stream every one of them. I've got a lot of thinking to do before this change happens. Unlike Netflix, I want to get it right.

Erik Bates | September 19, 2011
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Scott Hardie | September 19, 2011
My friends,

I'm sorry to hear that some of you are unhappy about the new format of Celebrity Goo Game. It's my fault for not announcing it better.

Therefore, I'm going to spin off that game into a separate website called Gooster. Here at Funeratic, I'm going to focus on Gothic Earth and movie reviews, which I think are the future of the site. This change will double my free time for working on Funeratic and Gooster.

Of course, you'll have to maintain two separate accounts, and login to each site separately. And all of your previous accomplishments will not carry over, so you'll have to start guessing all over again if you want to get your Gooster lifetime score back up to what it was.

But don't worry! I'm done tweaking Gooster's format. I've heard loud and clear how much you don't like the way it is now, so I promise to stop changing it any more.

Respectfully yours,

Scott

Justin Woods | September 19, 2011
That's funny!

Scott Hardie | September 21, 2011
Two analyses of Netflix's decision by the Atlantic: one eloquently asks "WTF are they thinking?" and the other considers them doomed.

One blogger offers what Netflix should have said. Spot-on.

Of course, there may have been an ulterior motive.

Erik Bates | September 21, 2011
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Scott Hardie | January 13, 2012
After almost a decade, I've finally canceled my disc subscription to Netflix. I'm keeping streaming, because I use it and like it. But as much as I enjoy the selection available on disc, and the convenience of queuing movies for later rental on disc that aren't available now (something I really wish they would add for streaming), it's just not worth another $9 a month for something that I don't use much anymore. I need to trim my living expenses, and this one is long overdue. But those red envelopes brought me a lot of happiness over the years, and I'm still sad to see them stop coming. I have just enough time left on the account to rent one last movie, and I'm pretty sure I picked a good one

Erik Bates | January 13, 2012
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