Devindra has been writing about the way technology intersects with our lives for nearly 20 years. He started the Amherst Student's first technology column, worked in IT support for many (many) years, and eventually moved to Brooklyn to cover New York's tech scene in 2009.
This week, Devindra and Engadget's Nathan Ingraham discuss the new Max documentary"MoviePass, MovieCrash" and reminisce about the early days of that wild startup. It was a huge mess in the end, but we wouldn't have subscription plans in theaters without it. We also chat with MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes , as well as the documentary's director, Muta'Ali, about the film.
It's about that subscription movie theater startup, which I think everybody, a lot of people were into way back when, and I have a lot of fond memories about it too. We'll talk about that thing and also the story of MoviePass. And we also have an interview with the co founder and current CEO of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes and the director of the documentary, Muta'Ali.
I feel like we may take it for granted today, folks, but if you look around, like every major theater chain has a subscription plan, for 20 or 30 bucks a month, you get all you can eat movies. Maybe some wiggle room around pricing and stuff there. Before MoviePass, none of that existed. And that the whole idea of paying a flat fee for all you can eat movies was just like something the entire industry was totally against.
Like Mitch Lowe had the like 100 plan and the 50 plan. Yeah. Like as soon as he came on, it went nowhere. And then why do we know why I don't think anybody wants to pay a hundred bucks a month. I wasn't, I love movies. I love going to the theater. I would not pay a hundred bucks a month for this. Then they came up with the 10 a month, all you can eat movie plan, right?when I remember starting to really hear about it. That's when the buzz broke out. Cause that was so cheap.
And watching this documentary just brought up a lot of feelings for me, namely, because I remember being really pissed off about this whole story, because first of all, Stacey Spikes is a rare black entrepreneur in the startup world, and you never really see that. So I was like, it's cool that MoviePass is a thing coming from black founders and was like finding some success.
This documentary is worth a watch. I think it's great where things are right now. C. Spikes ended up buying the like remnants of the company at auction for a low price and he's resurrecting it now. I think at a more sustainable price, it's 30 to 40 a month. It's run it using credits instead of just giving you the full money for a ticket.
I was a movie podcaster at the time, still am, but it was blowing my mind to see the convergence of my interests of the movie side and the tech side of things. So we have been talking a while.
And together we developed a way to tell this story. And shortly within that period after a short period of time. I got to meet Stacey over Zoom and really was, obviously impressed by him, impressed by his journey and got a little bit more of an inside look at what had transpired and I was like wow, okay this story is definitely something that I think needs to be told.Yeah. Devindra, I have to wonder, where were you when MoviePass was at its rise? I'm wondering how you missed it.
Like we literally were born. On Thursday and got turned off by them on Friday. The next day we had done a premiere and a press event in San Francisco, and this was on a Thursday and we're going to let people in on beta. And then the next morning AMC released an announcement that slow, slow down.the way, because like they had to approve this in the beginning. They had to know this was happening.
So really the theater would be rejecting their own customer, whether they were paying with their debit card. Their regular MasterCard or say a movie past MasterCard.And the theater is getting a full price ticket purchase too. So it's not like you were getting discounted tickets. I want to set up the context here too, because I think in 2024, the landscape of cinemas looks really different.
So that's one verification. The second verification is that there is an MCC code, which is a merchant category code that you're at a theater, not a gas station or a bowling alley or a pizza place. So that was the second thing you needed. And then. The third was that your account was in good standing and those three things cross referencing each other authorized the ability to get your ticket.
And I remember the exact moment Stacey, when that news hit and I was like, Oh, that's cool. That's going to get hype, but that's clearly unsustainable.There's a step in between there. So when Mitch first came on, Mitch actually went in the other direction. He went up to almost a hundred dollar plan. But rather than be like let's stop before we fall off a cliff. They were like, let's keep going. This is the mentality, by the way, like I have been covering startups since 2010. Like this was the era of growth at all costs, right? User growth at all costs.
And so I think that put him in a position where he was like, sure I'll grant you the interview. And it was odd at the end of the interview, I had the sense that he was being honest with us to a certain degree, but I also had the sense that he might've been Less, less aware of the effect he had on things than I expected him to be.so that, that was a little bit off putting.
Chris Kelly had two seats and then there was Humei and I. And so they said, we're going to give your seats, to HMMY. And we said expand the board. Why are you going to take off the founders? And Mitch said I don't want anyone, he literally said, I don't want anyone who works for me on the board. And when we get there, he said, I want to meet with you before we go. And I'm going to meet each of the members of the team individually. He said, so going forward I'm going to have you be the director of marketing. I'll give you a higher position if I feel that it's deserved. Ah, but consider that you're on probation at this point, and depending upon the performance.
Can you talk about that aspect of it, of not actually being able to get the funding and, Hey, a white CEO comes in along with, Ted Farnsworth down the line, And then all of a sudden it is, it's like money is being thrown at them, or at least they are getting a lot more funding almost instantly.I think Devindra did, this was one of our biggest, both concerns, but needs is you have to tell. Different than a lot of tech stories.
I do think though that the film conveys on a few sides that people's biases play a role in how they initially categorize somebody. And in the, I think Mitch's ability to come across a certain way in terms of his appearance, and also Ted Farnsworth's ability, gave them a benefit of the doubt when you could argue that they maybe didn't, that wasn't warranted.ability to like, cosplay success, basically. Hey, walk into a room and be like, hey, I'm, look at me.
To the early days when you had Jackie Robinson or players starting to show up on the field that looked different than what people are used to seeing. And there's a harder road that those early guys have to go. But if you can create innovation, I think that the more you can People like him and I show up the more in the venture capital will become colorblind, but there's still a, you don't quite look the role of what we imagine.
That's a whole thing, but I think The sort of phoenix rising out of the ashes story here is that you've brought MoviePass back, Stacey, you are doing your own thing with it I know it's only in limited markets right now, but can you tell us like how is, how are things going now with the new movie pass?Yeah, so 2023 we opened in May nationwide, so now you can get it anywhere in the country. And we ended 2023 at a 23% profit margin.
So I'm a Regal Crown Club member and I am an AMC Stubbs member. And even though I'm using my MoviePass, I'm getting points. So from a marketplace perspective, we see ourselves like the Airbnb of sales. Cinema where on it's a market where there is a buyer and a seller. So there is the theater where you're going to go in the same way.
There were big saws and a jackhammer. You could hear it on livestream. But you'll barely be able to hear it in the podcast because Audio Cleanup has gotten that good. We tried three different cleanup programs, two of which were powered by machine learning, and picked what sounded best. We'll talk more about Audio Cleanup next week, and you'll find out what app saved this nigh unsalvageable audio.Okay. Let's move on to some other news this week.
I rarely see people outside of schools and businesses actually using Chromebooks, so certainly have not seen any Chromebook plus models either. In terms of these features, they seem cool, but also I guess I can't get really excited about it, right? Like I don't. Yeah. And Microsoft and all the other AI things are doing this too.
Yeah. So some of the AI texts you sent us Nate in Slack it just sounded like you were talking like Steve Rogers. You all of a sudden sounded like Captain America, hello team. So that's a 20 buck a month plan that gives you two terabytes of storage and drive as well as access to Gemini advanced. So just from a pure, monetary standpoint, that's a pretty good thing. And even if you never touched the Gemini advanced, The storage itself is worth, a hundred bucks a year.Yeah.
But you haven't been able to use it on a laptop until now, because you can get the Google photos app on the Chromebook. And then there you can do things like, select certain parts of the photo and move them around or resize them, change the background or the the color of the sky, that sort of thing. They just want you to pay more money, right? That's it. They just want you to pay a recurring fee that you'll pay forever because you want to. Type a string of text and make a pretty image,yeah. And I'm going to play around with it because I now have Gemini advance, but I opened to Gemini and I look at it and I'm like, I have no idea what I want to do with this.
Has certain like voice isolation capabilities. We're not going to turn those on because our podcast editor wants clean audio to do their own. Their own edits on this stuff, but that's the idea is that you could do maybe real time transformations on things. There are currently jackhammers outside of Nate's window.
Moviepass Stacy Spikes Moviepass Stacey Spikes Ted Farnsworth Nathan Ingraham Mitch Lowe Mitch Lowe
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