Movie Theatres 2.0

Yaron Galai1 Comment
Credit: Matt Berggren (link below)

A little known fact is that I have a private, full-sized theater. Actually five theaters. I don’t technically own them… Regal Entertainment does and is gracious enough to operate them exclusively for me and my family.

Or at least that’s the impression I get. In nearly all movies we go to, we seem to have the whole theater pretty much to ourselves. I might be missing something in Regal’s business plan, but it seems to me awfully hard to sustain that huge operation just for an occasional visit of the 4 of us (well, I admit – the price we pay for a single bucket of pop-corn does probably cover a month’s rent and then some).

There are 100 reasons why theaters are bleeding audience (DVD’s, TiVo’s, VOD, Netflix, etc, etc). But I think at the core it all boils down to the fact that the scheduling of movies in theaters totally sucks. The movies playing in theaters at any given day are determined by some anachronistic distribution structure that was conceived ~80 years ago, an era in which content (and film reel distribution) were in short supply, and audiences were abundant.

This is flipped by 1800 today: content (and distribution means) are abundant, and audience attention is extremely scarce. This requires flipping the distribution model by 1800 too.

Here’s an idea that I’m hereby contributing to the movie theater industry, free of charge:

  • Launch a website where people can signup with their zip code.
  • Hook up to IMDB (or the likes), and let people browse a catalog of movies.
  • Let each registered user check the movies they’re interested in seeing in theater format.
  • As soon as a movie reaches X number of interested viewers, the system will find an open screening slot for the next 1-2 weeks.
  • An automated email would go out to all those that signed up for that movie.

There are probably about 50 movies I can think of which I missed when they were first playing in theaters and I’d love to see on the big screen. Probably about another 100 which I’d be happy to see again in theater format. And probably about 500 others that I can’t even remember right now.

Imagine being able to go out to the movies and see Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or even Citizen Kane… Or taking my kids out to see ET or Charlie Chaplin or Disney’s Fantasia… How cool would that be?!….

(I know – there are probably a hundred technical and legal reasons why not to do this… whatever… I guess the Regal’s of the world will just have to die while babbling those excuses before someone like Mark Cuban does this…)

{Image CC MattBerggren – thanks!}

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Microsoft finally understands – dog chasing is dead

Yaron GalaiLeave a comment

Ms_yahoo_2With today’s news re Microsoft looking to acquire Yahoo, it seems like they finally get it –
The performance-based advertising world is like no other space that Microsoft has ever played in before.

In spreadsheets, browsers, servers, databases, etc, etc – the Microsoftian way of doing business works like a charm. In all those categories, dog chasing proved to be a great way for Microsoft to win the market because it could out-price and out-patient its competition. Oh – and tying products into the OS monopoly didn’t hurt too much either… 😉

With performance-based advertising[1], dog chasing ceased to be an option. You can’t undercut competition, because competition ain’t pricing their product (it’s the customers/advertisers who do, and they price it upwards, not downwards). You can’t out-patient your competition because performance-based advertising has this wonderful virtuous cycle about it:

  • The more clicks you have, the smarter your yield-optimization algorithms get…
  • …as the algorithms grow smarter, you can better predict your revenue per page…
  • …as your revenue-prediction power grows, you can better price new distribution deals with the confidence of not losing money…
  • …the better you can price deals, the more distribution you get…
  • …and the more distribution you get, the more clicks (and $$’s…) you have.

This virtuous cycle means that with every *second* that Microsoft was spending figuring out its world-domination dog-chase plan, Google (and others, Quigo included) were opening the gap making it even closer to impossible for Microsoft to become a real player in this space. And every purchase of a DoubleClick, RightMedia, etc just moved way more click data out of Microsoft’s hands, opening the gap even more. Chasing a dog that’s only gaining momentum faster than you, well – that’s not a great chase to be in… 

I’ve had many conversations with good friends over at Microsoft over the past couple of years. And while the notion was that "we changed", "there’s no more NIH Syndrome", "we’re ready to make bold acquisitions needed to win this market", etc, etc – It’s clear now that none of that really registered there and the plan all along was to dog-chase Google to victory. Looks like the price for realizing this mistake is going to be pretty big.

A ton more coverage on TechCrunch, Henry Blodget… oh what the heck – and everyone else on the planet.

[1] Disclosure: I’m co-founder of Quigo, a player in this space.

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Sharing my favorite posts

Yaron GalaiLeave a comment

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How many times did you finish seeing a wonderful movie, and said to yourself "whoa – this movie was so good, I’d like to tell all my friends to run and see it"?

But then when you got back home – how many times did you actually write an email about the movie and CC’ed your whole address book on that email? I’ll take a wild guess – you haven’t.

Blogs are the same. I read a ton of blog posts and find myself daily thinking "this was an excellent post that I’d love to share with my friends/family/blog readers/peers/etc". Sometimes I email the link to a couple of people. If I have time, I might write a full post about it on this blog. But usually I don’t have time to do either and those gems I find go away without any of my friends ever knowing about them.

Netflix has a wonderful solution for movies – You tell Netflix which movies you loved, and they in return aggregate and package those recommendations in a useful way that is automatically shared with all your friends (well – those who use Netflix at least). Your friends get access to the brilliant movies you find, and vice versa – you benefit from the gems that other people you trust find.

At outbrain we’re trying to do a similar thing for blog posts – you rate the stuff you read, and we’ll package and share it  in useful ways among the outbrain community.

Outbrain’s new blog widget which you can see here… —————————>
…contains those blog posts that I recently read and found most interesting. Those are the posts that I’d love to send each  one of you by email every time I stumble upon them. But I don’t. This is now the best place to peak over my shoulder and see  the best things I read recently. I think you’ll enjoy the stuff that shows up here.

As of today, we’re opening up this widget for more bloggers to use on their blogs. If you have a blog and are interested in getting  this widget – drop me a note:
galai [at] outbrain [dot] com

Or register here.

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