MoviePass reportedly resorted to extreme tactics to prevent users from taking advantage of core features, according to a new report from Business Insider. In particular, the report highlights a strategy the company used to keep users from bankrupting it, by changing account passwords to prevent ticket purchases that might cost it money it didn't have. The Verge reports: Business Insider's report looks at how Ted Farnsworth, CEO of MoviePass parent company Helios & Matheson Analytics, and MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe, transformed the company from a little-known subscription service to a nationwide sensation. It also delves deep into the questionable business strategies and tactics the duo used to keep the company afloat, all while it hemorrhaged money by fronting subscribers the full cost of a movie ticket. MoviePass was not immediately available for comment.

Business Insider's report outlined how the company took on a more adversarial stance toward power users that were costing it too much money. One employee noted, "Before Mitch came on it was, 'How do we slow down those users?' With Mitch [Lowe] it was just, 'F--- those guys.'" The company tried other tactics to actively make its service hard to use, like when it limited the ability for users to see high-profile films like Avengers: Infinity War and Mission Impossible: Fallout. Employees say Lowe demanded they change the passwords of "a small percentage of power users" ahead of those releases to prevent them from ordering tickets through the app, telling people that it was a "technical issue." The company also implemented a "trip wire," which would cut off users once the company reached a certain monetary threshold each day. Users were told "there are no more screenings at this theater today," when in reality MoviePass was disabling its services to prevent it from burning through too much cash.

Disney will offer a bundle package of its three streaming services -- Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ -- for $12.99 a month starting on November 12th, the company has announced. From a report: The company previously hinted at a bundle for all three services, but CEO Bob Iger made it official during the company's investors call Tuesday. At $12.99, the bundle is cheaper than -- or on par with -- competitive streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. It's also significantly cheaper than HBO Max's rumored streaming price of $16-$17 a month. Hulu is currently available for $5.99 a month (with ads), and ESPN+ costs $4.99 a month. ESPN+ is the Disney-owned sports streaming platform, which carries "hundreds of MLB, NHL and MLS games, Grand Slam tennis, Top Rank boxing, PGA Tour golf, college sports, international rugby, cricket, the full library of ESPN Films including 30 for 30, and more."

Matt Levine, writing for Bloomberg: Is there a Harvard Business School case study of MoviePass yet? I feel like there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the MoviePass story, but maybe that's wrong. Maybe all of the lessons are just "if you do the opposite of normal business things, it will work, but only for a while." Maybe business school students should actively avoid learning that lesson. Anyway Jason Guerrasio has a big story on the rise and fall of MoviePass at Business Insider today. The basics of the story -- MoviePass was a business that charged people $9.95 a month to see unlimited movies in theaters, and then paid the theaters full price for the tickets, losing money on each transaction and eventually falling into a huge and comical financial hole -- were familiar to me, and probably to you, and it's not like we didn't already know it was weird. But I learned a lot from this article about how weird it was.

For instance, under founder Stacy Spikes, MoviePass charged $50 a month for its service, but couldn't get enough subscribers to break even. Then it was acquired by Helios & Matheson Analytics, whose chief executive officer, Ted Farnsworth, came up with the idea of charging much less: "Why Farnsworth settled on $10 is unclear. Several people told me he wanted a price that would grab headlines. ... But in July 2017, the MoviePass board agreed to the deal. And on August 15, the price drop went into effect. Thanks to word-of-mouth buzz and press attention, within two days subscriptions jumped from about 20,000 to 100,000. MoviePass had transformed from a scrappy startup trying to keep the lights on to a disrupter in the making."

What an amazing sentence. It went from being "a scrappy startup trying to keep the lights on" (bad) to a buzzy "disrupter in the making" (good) by giving up on trying to keep the lights on. The trick is not to make enough money to cover your costs; it's to stop trying. Losing a lot of money is better than losing a little money; it has more panache, attracts more attention, certainly gives you that attractive hockey-stick user growth. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure three hundred million pounds, result unicorn.

From a report: Violent video games (and television and movies) have been a frequent scapegoat for acts of real-world violence. But it's hard to ignore the fact that video games are popular all over the world, yet mass shootings aren't common in most of those places. Naturally, that was the case put forth by the Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry's trade group. "Violent crime has been decreasing in our country at the very time that video games have been increasing in popularity," the group said in a statement. "And other societies, where video games are played as avidly, do not contend with the tragic levels of violence that occur in the U.S." The same case is also backed up by academic research. "Study after study has established that there is no causal link between video games and real world violence," the ESA said.

An anonymous reader writes: To stay on Beijing's good side, U.S. filmmakers are willing to kowtow to China's authoritarian regime, and there seems no limit to their willingness to acquiesce. Take Top Gun: Maverick, a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic action film that made Tom Cruise a superstar. After the sequel's trailer was unveiled at San Diego's ComicCon last week, alert fans noted that the iconic leather flight jacket worn by Cruise's character in the original film had been altered. All of the patches from the original film were there except for flags representing Chinese adversaries Japan and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Those flags were missing. The culprits were soon pretty obvious. The Hollywood Reporter found that the Chinese company Tencent is co-financing the sequel. Co-producing the film along with Paramount Pictures is Skydance, which is partially owned by Tencent.

"Top Gun is an American classic, and it's incredibly disappointing to see Hollywood elites appease the Chinese Communist Party," Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lamented to the Washington Free Beacon. "The Party uses China's economy to silence dissent against its brutal repression and to erode the sovereignty of American allies like Taiwan. Hollywood is afraid to stand up for free speech and is enabling the Party's campaign against Taiwan." Senator Lindsey Graham, a colleague of Cruz's, chimed in. "I hate to see the flag removed because of Chinese financing," he said in an interview with TMZ. "It's nothing the government can do, but I think it sucks." Nor is Top Gun: Maverick the only example of genuflection. China is almost uniformly portrayed in American movies as a technologically advanced superpower (see movies such as The Martian, 2012, and Looper). In Looper, a science-fiction drama, a time-traveler is learning French and saving his money so that he can move to Paris. But his boss, who is from the future, says he is making a mistake.

An anonymous reader quotes Variety: Oculus VR headset users just got one more video service to watch in their virtual living rooms: Amazon's Prime Video service went live on Oculus Go, Quest and Samsung Gear VR headsets with a dedicated Prime Video VR app Wednesday.

In addition to access to the entire Prime Video catalog, Prime Video VR will also feature select 360-degree video films. At launch, these include "Invasion!" from Baobab Studios and "Greenland Melting" from Frontline and NOVA, according to a blog post.

The app offers users a way to watch Prime Video titles in a virtual theater setting, and also comes with voice search for the entire Prime catalog. Prime Video VR is at launch only available to Prime subscribers in the U.S. and the U.K., but there does seem to be a way for users who aren't Prime subscribers to browse their Amazon Video purchases.

With more streaming services coming from WarnerMedia, Apple and Disney, it has people wishing for a single plan to get access to all of them. A new survey from Morning Consult in conjunction with The Hollywood Reporter polled consumers to see how much they'd be willing to pay for access to all their favorite video streaming services. The research reveals that most consumers would like to pay between $17 and $27. From the report: Many Americans who stream media pay for three services at a collective $37 per month, though the optimum price for wooing far more households to multiple streamers is a combined $21 a month, the poll finds. The acceptable range consumers would like to pay for all their streaming offerings is $17 to $27. (The poll uses the Van Westendorp model, which seeks to locate the sweet spot in pricing between what consumers deem "too good to be true" and "too expensive.") The results of the poll may be unwelcome news for WarnerMedia, since its coming product, dubbed HBO Max, is expected to cost consumers as much as $17 monthly, whereas Disney's service, called Disney+, will run only $7 monthly when it kicks off in November. (Netflix has an $8.99 basic plan and $12.99 standard plan.) The poll shows that consumers are willing to pay much more for their cable TV package than they are for streaming, as the poll indicates that 90 percent of U.S. subscribers pay more than $50 per month for their service.

"The poll also found that [...] 26 percent of adult Americans have heard nothing at all about Disney+," according to The Hollywood Reporter. "About 35 percent of American adults have heard nothing of Apple's upcoming product, while 40 percent haven't heard of WarnerMedia's plans and 46 percent haven't heard of NBCU's."

With TVs now delivering images faster than movies, TV manufacturers have tried to make up for that discrepancy via a digital process called motion smoothing. Whether you've realized it or not, you've likely watched a movie in motion smoothing, as it's now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. Bilge Ebiri from Vulture says that while this feature was well-intentioned, "most people hate it." He argues: "Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you're watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film." From the report: Motion smoothing is unquestionably a compromised way of watching films and TV shows, which are meticulously crafted to look and feel the way they do. But its creeping influence is so pervasive that at the Cannes Film Festival this May -- the same Cannes Film Festival that so valorizes the magic of the theatrical experience and has been feuding with Netflix for the past two years -- the fancy official monitors throughout the main festival venue had left motion smoothing on.

That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."

ikhider writes: Breukelen, Amsterdam born actor, Rutger Hauer, who played Roy Batty in the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner and improvised the "tears in the rain" dialogue as his android character died, has too finally passed away last Friday after an illness. His funeral was held on Wednesday, July 24th. Hauer starred in TV since 1969 and then went on to movies like Sin City and Batman Begins, but is best known as Roy Batty, the android built with a four year lifespan who, with fellow androids, desperately wanted an extension. His costars paid tribute via social media. Perhaps we, the fans, can do so with private screenings of one of the Director's Cut of Blade Runner.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Because of the convoluted nature of licensing agreements and the vagaries of corporate competition, what's on Netflix is substantively different than what's available on Hulu or Amazon Prime. Different still are the network-specific streamers, like the up-and-comers HBO Max and Disney+, and the more niche offerings, like Shudder, Kanopy, Mubi, and Criterion. All of them have the same aim, which is to lock up intellectual property to keep people streaming. It's a lot! Plex, a company that sells media server software, has found itself in the strange position of being the answer to that problem. It has two components: the piece of software that organizes media on your computer's hard drive and the client-side program that lets you and your friends and family stream that content from wherever you are on just about any device.

It's clean. It's beautiful. It is extraordinarily simple to use. It looks a little like Netflix. Except, all of the content is custom, tailored by the person running the server. In the company's words, both pieces of its software are "the key to personal media bliss." What Plex doesn't say, however, is how that bliss is achieved. Because what's on Plex servers is populated by people, most of the commercial content you'd find there is probably pirated. And this is the main tension of using Plex: while the software itself is explicitly legal, the media that populates its customer-run servers is not -- at least the stuff protected by copyright law. The company, of course, doesn't condone this particular use of its software.

While tech giants like Microsoft and Google are building cloud gaming platforms for the latest blockbuster titles, one start-up is taking a different approach. From a report: London-based firm Antstream says it wants to bring a streaming experience to retro gaming enthusiasts. The company has developed a cloud gaming service that gives players access to a library of over 2,000 classic video games. It's a model that CEO Steve Cottam sees going global. And to bolster that ambition, the company has raised its first significant round of funding, led by the Chinese tech giant Tencent and backed by British venture firm Hambro Perks. For Antstream, the project is about resurrecting an experience long buried in old devices like the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Cottam told CNBC in an interview that the idea for the company stemmed from what he's been seeing elsewhere in the entertainment industry. "You've got Spotify and Apple for your music, while in movies you've got Netflix and Amazon," he said. "It's so easy to find that content, but games just got lost because of all these different formats, and they didn't work on modern devices."

Disney's presentation of Marvel's "Avengers: Endgame" has officially surpassed "Avatar" to become the world's highest-grossing film of all time, several months after the film obliterated opening weekend records. From a report: The feat underscores Disney's position as the king of the box office. Disney has had the top grossing movie every year since 2012 and been the top grossing studio since 2016. Disney has reported an estimated $2,790.2 million in revenue through Sunday for "Avengers: Endgame," per Comscore. James Cameron's 2009 science fiction film "Avatar" had previously held the top spot of the highest grossing global release of all time with $2,789.7 million. Disney's success can largely be attributed to the three franchises that it has cultivated or acquired over the past few years: Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.

"At Comic-Con, Sir Patrick Stewart took to the Hall H stage Saturday afternoon to discuss his new series, Star Trek: Picard," reports CBS News: The series will focus on what caused famed captain and admiral Jean-Luc Picard to leave Starfleet, and his life since.... Patrick Stewart -- who is also an executive producer -- answered questions about the show. "We never know, do we, when our best moment will be. And that is now," Stewart said. "I knew something unusual would happen. I knew I needed to be a part of it."

Stewart has been heavily involved in crafting "Star Trek: Picard" and frequently visits the writer's room... Brent Spiner, who played the character Data on TNG, said there was "no way" he could say no to the opportunity to work with Stewart again....

The show is set 20 years after the events of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" around the year 2399. This sets the series further into the future than any previous Star Trek series. But fans should not expect to see the same Jean-Luc Picard they know from "The Next Generation" series. During the press tour, Kurtzman teased that the show will be very different and "grounded." The series will explore how Picard has changed in that time, making him reckon with the choices he has made. Kurtzman hinted that there are circumstances that have "radically" shifted that have caused the beloved Starfleet admiral to question his life decisions.
The two-minute trailer includes a surprising cameo, and Variety reports that CBS has also committed to two seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks, an animated series focused on "the support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships." (They also report that Seth MacFarlane announced season 3 of The Orville will be moving from Fox to Hulu.)

Also at Comic-Con, HBO shared the first full trailer for their upcoming Watchmen TV series, a sequel to the original Alan Moore graphic novel. Rolling Stone quotes HBO as saying that Watchmen "takes place in an alternative, contemporary reality in the United States, in which masked vigilantes became outlawed due to their violent methods."

Marvel also revealed that their next Thor movie (Thor: Love and Thunder) will incude both Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman as Lady Thor, and shared footage from their upcoming Black Widow movie. And CNET has a comprehensive rundown (with trailers) of all the DC Comics superhero shows on the CW network, including Arrow, Supergirl, The Flash, Black Lightning, and Batwoman.

An anonymous reader quotes Android Authority: Studios like Disney and NBCUniversal are making preparations to launch their own streaming services, and they are planning to take back their back catalog of films and TV series with them. That's also what's happening with WarnerMedia, the AT&T-owned entertainment group that operates, among many other things, HBO, Warner Bros, and CNN. Recently, the conglomerate announced its own upcoming dedicated streaming service, HBO Max... Unconfirmed reports from Hollywood trade news outlets claim that HBO Max will cost between $16 and $17 a month. The service will be ad-free, although some reports have indicated that WarnerMedia might launch an ad-supported version of HBO Max at some point after the official launch in 2020. If that happens, it's likely the cost to sign up will be much less...

While HBO Max will have quite a lot for subscribers to watch from WarnerMedia's library of content, it will have its own range of original TV shows and movies that will be found exclusively on the streaming service. They will be known as Max Originals. Here's what has been announced for HBO Max so far, which includes a couple of spin-offs from current and upcoming Warner Bros. series:

Dune: The Sisterhood: Based on the classic Dune sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert, this 10-part series will focus on the Bene Gesserit group of women in this universe. Denis Villeneuve, who is directing the upcoming feature film adaptation of Dune, will also direct the pilot episode of the series.

Gremlins -- The Animated Series: The mischievous and destructive creatures from the two Gremlins feature films will return as an animated series on HBO Max...
A beta version of the service may launch before the end of 2019, according to Deadline. The studio's announcement also promised that HBO Max woud also include previously-announced HBO programs, including:

• Stephen King's The Outsider, a dark mystery starring Ben Mendelsohn, produced and directed by Jason Bateman.

• Lovecraft Country, a unique horror series based on a novel by Matt Ruff, written and executive produced by Misha Green, and executive produced by Jordan Peele (Us) and J.J. Abrams (Westworld).

• The Nevers, Joss Whedon's new science fiction series starring Laura Donnelly.

dryriver writes: The line "sharks with fricking lasers" was once popular on Slashdot. It sounds like a joke, but a never-made James Bond movie co-written back in the day by Sean Connery was actually going to feature robotic sharks carrying stolen NATO nukes in order to attack New York. Bond was going to stop the sharks inside the New York sewer system, waterski out of the sewers, paraglide up to the Statue of Liberty's head, then fight a Bond villain inside said head, with the villain's "blood trickling out of the Statue of Liberty's eye like tears" at the end of the fight. All this was going to happen without the consent of Cubby Broccoli, the official producer of the Bond movies. Why did the movie never get made? The producers of competing Bond movies were fighting in court over who has what rights to the franchise and characters. In the end, "Bond fights robot sharks with nukes" was scrapped, and "Never Say Never Again," a remake of "Thunderball," was made instead. This featured stolen nukes as well, but unfortunately no robot sharks or other "Austin Powers" style silliness.

Netflix said on Wednesday that it will roll out a cheaper subscription plan in India, one of the last great growth markets for global companies, as the streaming giant scrambles to find ways to accelerate its slowing growth worldwide. From a report: The company added 2.7 million new subscribers in the quarter that ended in June this year, it said today, far fewer than the 5 million figure it had forecasted earlier this year. The company said lowering its subscription plan, which starts at $9 in the U.S., would help it reach more users in India and expand its overall subscriber base. The new plan will be available in India in Q3. According to third-party research firms, Netflix has fewer than 2 million subscribers in India. Netflix started to test a lower-priced subscription plan in India and some other markets in Asia late last year. The plan restricts the usage of the service to one mobile device and offers only the standard definition viewing (~480p). During the period of testing, which was active as of two months ago, the company charged users as low as $4. [...] For Netflix, the decision to lower its pricing in India comes at a time when it has hiked the subscription cost in many parts of the world in recent quarters. In the U.S., for instance, Netflix said earlier this year that it would raise its subscription price by up to 18%.

The 1978 arcade game Space Invader will become a major motion picture, reports Engadget. "The writer behind the 'Mortal Kombat' reboot is involved."

Deadline reports: It will take work fleshing this into a full-fledged alien-invasion movie, but the title is certainly a brand. In the game, a series of blocky aliens descended from the top of the screen to the bottom, and players basically blasted them until their thumbs cramped, or the invaders succeeded in overwhelming the slow-triggered defender of earth.
"Nothing surprises me any more," adds the headline at Io9. Once, I would be surprised and bemused by the things Hollywood tries to turn into major franchises in 2019. I might observe how the truth now matches what we used to make up as parody. But, look, Battleship is a real movie and Rihanna was in it and that was seven years ago... Since the arcade game is entirely devoid of plot, except for the riveting narrative of shooting up until your thumbs cramp, it'll probably be some entirely original plot about alien invaders, maybe something Independence Day-esque, with some inevitable cute nods to the original thrown in... [W]e'll keep you posted as long as you keep putting quarters into the machine.
Yahoo Movies UK calls the news "apparent proof that Hollywood will literally make a movie out of anything... Also in the pipeline is a live-action outing for Sonic the Hedgehog, which was delayed earlier this year so that Paramount could redesign the character following a fan backlash."

I'm still waiting for a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster based on Pong.

Consumers are so stressed about finding the right thing to watch on their streaming services that, after a few minutes scanning the options, many decide to watch something they've already seen, revert to traditional TV, or turn the tube off altogether. From a report: As more companies jump into the streaming wars, the choice-overload problem could alienate customers, drive away subscribers and limit the industry's growth. U.S. adults typically spend a little over 7 minutes searching for something to watch on a streaming service, according to a new report from Nielsen's MediaTech Trender, a quarterly consumer tracking survey focused on emerging technology. Younger adults ages 18-49 take between 8 and 10 minutes to browse before giving up, while older adults typically spend around 5 minutes. Overall, 21% of respondents say that "when they want to watch, but they don't know exactly what," they end up giving up the hunt.

As Walt Disney, AT&T's WarnerMedia and Apple prepare to enter the crowded streaming-entertainment market, they are racing to stand out with eye-catching shows that cost as much for a season as a big-budget movie [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: These new services are hoping their planned television epics will capture the cultural conversation, like "Game of Thrones" did. They are also hoping to convince subscribers that their offerings are worth paying for in a market dominated by Netflix, HBO and Hulu. The competition is prompting newcomers to shell out between $8 million and $15 million an episode, significantly more than what the average TV show used to cost. For a single season, after including marketing and other expenses, the total can easily exceed $150 million -- or roughly what it costs to put a new "Spider-Man" movie in theaters nationwide.

When Netflix began making "House of Cards" in 2013 at $4.5 million an episode, it looked like a costly bet. Now, Disney has built intergalactic-desert landscapes for the "Star Wars" spinoff "The Mandalorian," whose cost for an episode approaches $15 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon.com spent $250 million just for the rights to develop a "Lord of the Rings" series. Apple signed up "Aquaman" star Jason Momoa for its fantasy series "See," while Showtime has the videogame adaptation "Halo" and Warner Bros. prepares Frank Herbert's "Dune." With massive casts, exotic filming locations and copious special effects, budgets have ballooned to amounts once considered unfathomable for a TV show. One driving factor, executives say, is that high-profile TV shows are offered up next to theatrical films available to stream on the same service, so original programming can't risk looking like B-material next to the movies.

There's HBO Go, HBO Now, and soon, there will be HBO Max. For WarnerMedia and parent company AT&T, the latter is most important, as it will become the subscription video service that they position against Netflix, Hulu, the upcoming Disney+, Apple's upcoming TV+, and a range of other paid video offerings. From a report: "Anchored with and inspired by the legacy of HBO's excellence and award-winning storytelling, the new service will be 'Maximized' with an extensive collection of exclusive original programming (Max Originals) and the best-of-the-best from WarnerMedia's enormous portfolio of beloved brands and libraries," the company wrote in a press release today. (The emphasis there is from WarnerMedia, of course.) So you'll get all the stuff you'd expect from having HBO -- TV series, on-demand movies, watching some primetime HBO shows live -- plus a huge serving of content from basically every other WarnerMedia property. More relevant to you is that WarnerMedia also confirmed that HBO Max will have exclusive streaming rights to every episode of Friends when it launches in spring 2020; that'll be after the hugely popular sitcom departs Netflix. Friends is set to leave in 2019, so there might be a gap where the show disappears from streaming altogether until HBO Max's debut.