Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Billy Wonka (A) on July 07, 2016 at 19:06:28

In Reply to: RE: Movie Pass Crisis . . . posted by Billy Wonka on July 07, 2016 at 12:36:49

MoviePass, the subscription service that lets you see one theatrical film every 24 hours, has come under fire after testing out new pricing options with some customers, which are significantly more expensive and restrictive than existing plans. The complaints also come on the heels of this week's announcement of a new CEO: Mitch Lowe, a Netflix co-founder who later moved over to RedBox.

While the service typically starts around $30 a month (though it varies by market, it's $45 monthly in NYC), a select group of users have received emails saying their plans will move to $40 or $50 a month with a limit of six films. For truly unlimited viewing, they have the option of paying $99 a month, a price significantly above anything MoviePass has charged before. Previously, MoviePass subscribers could see one film a day on their base plans, the only restriction was they could only see each film once.

"We're trying to understand all the different considerations about different price points," Lowe said in an interview today. He stressed that the company is only testing new pricing with an incredibly small portion of its subscribers, and these messages don't reflect new rates for all customers.

In particular, he discovered that the $99 plan won't work at all. "Our goal was to try to see what the uppermost limit was and we definitely found that that was too high," he said. While it might seem unfair to loyal customers to simply throw expensive new rates at them, Lowe defended that method, saying that it's "the only way to really get a valid test... If you give people a choice, they almost always take what you'd expect, so you don't learn anything."

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