Does MoviePass intend to make money from data mining its subscribers’ movements? Of course they do.
Will they or do they already monitor how many people leave a movie after 20 minutes, 40 minutes, etc.?
I imagine MoviePass has a “Subscriber Compliance” division staffed with individuals in surveillance bunkers monitoring movements of subscribers from the moment they bought tickets using the MoviePass card to the moment they left. This Compliance crew watches and collects data on subscribers leaving their seats midway to use the bathroom, or to switch seats — indicating impatience or boredom with the movie. The crew takes note note, and communicates to the movie’s producers their play-by-play account of which subscribers left early, which moved around the most, etc.
Subscriber Compliance monitors with particular interest the individuals who do not move once from their seat during a film, passing along data to filmmakers about the percentage of “100%s” who were so absorbed in the movie they did not move, and monetizing these individuals with precision-tuned advertising on their retinæ.
This tracking is, of course, done via the GPS tracking on subscribers’ smartphones. GPS tracking is a required feature of your smartphone for you to be a member of MoviePass. This disenfranchising requirement, I would think, will encourage Luddite-inspired attempts to circumvent the smartphone-only business model with clever means of fraud such as I have no concept or interest in conceptualizing.
The Subscriber Compliance surveillance is not only possible but probably happening already, intentionally or not. I don’t think there really is a live team of MoviePass staffers monitoring subscribers’ movements live and in real time. But the data on subscribers’ movements is no doubt being compiled. You can expect the behavior of yourself and other subscribers at the theater to be aggregated and averaged, and unlike other such datasets I bet it will never be fully anonymized.
MoviePass subscribers, whether they know it or not, could find themselves essentially being held hostage by MoviePass. If you have the temerity to leave a movie early, it doesn’t matter if you are sick or if there is a family emergency or if you just cannot stand the movie, then you could be penalized financially and possibly kicked out of the program. If you fail to commit to your once-a-day movie and give it your complete attention all the way to the last letters of the credits you risk having your MoviePass account terminated.
It’s in the TOS, I’m not making this up. Your account can be canceled if they catch you leaving a movie early more than once a month.
…
So, between that last sentence and this I encountered a mysterious glitch in the MoviePass app. I opened the app to a screen saying my account had been canceled, but no specific reason was given, just a list of possibilities.
I looked online and found avalanches of bitter complaints about MoviePass, everything from cards being declined at the box office to calling customer service and being put on hold indefinitely. I don’t know how much of all that I believe, since the Internet is where people go to complain and not to shower praise. But whatever the glitch I encountered I have to give props to the company for straightening it out within an hour or so. I was afraid this was another example of bots being in charge and making cancellation decisions with no human intervention, and from looking around online all I found was an avalanche of complaints and negative comments about the company’s customer service. Even the Better Business Bureau was not encouraging, with something like a 1.33 out of 5 rating at the time I looked. But complainers outnumber people like me, who rarely feel a compelling reason to publicly praise a company for doing it its job as it is expected to do. Is the BBB becoming yet another Yelp!?
So I went and saw I, Tonya. It was good, not great, but I and all in attendance stayed all the way to the end. I did not know until looking it up after that the evil mother was Allison Janney, who I recognized from The West Wing but could not place her. She was excellent in I, Tonya, if a little too evil to believe. I don’t think I recognized anyone else, although the Jeff Gillooly character looked uncomfortably like someone I used to work with at corporate. I mean so much like the guy I worked with it was was uncanny. That happened what I watched Dead Ringers, where the lead woman actress, who engaged in some S&M and hard sex scenes, looked disconcertingly like my friend’s wife.
Harding’s closing monologue was a bit much, or so it seemed on first pass. There was not a classy character to be found in this film, and I do not understand why they made it a hybrid comedy/drama. The domestic violence scenes made me wince and turn away. All in all masterfully directed, with certain of the villainous male characters almost becoming sympathetic in their seemingly insatiable thirst for engaging in stupidity.
I never had an avid interest in the Harding/Kerrington thing, but I remember it being all over the news. One interesting detail as the film ended showed the beginnings of the O.J. Simpson events as that story unfolded on a television behind one of the Jim Gillooly character. That 24-hour news cycle was just starting to cook on all cylinders.
