MovieGoer blog

Do I really want to see Y Combinator die? Of course not. I feel dirty just typing that title just now and having you read it. But I chose the title “Kill Y Combinator” precisely to show how harmful it is to make the kind of declaration (“Kill Hollywood”) YC made on their website on Friday. (Sure, I also chose it for the same reason YC chose their title: link-bait. It is effective. I feel dirty for that too.) But the line I will not cross is advocating the killing of anything, be it a person or an industry. It is not a helpful, or effective, or responsible way to go about creating change, let alone simply having a discussion.

Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, and the partners of Silicon Valley tech startup incubator Y Combinator were having lunch on Thursday when a discussion arose, no doubt triggered by the SOPA/PIPA protests this past week, that led to YC announcing they want to “Kill Hollywood” and fund companies that want to work toward that goal. Kill Hollywood. That’s the title they chose for their article. Is it inflammatory? Provocative? Divisive? For sure. Link-bait? Absolutely. Ugly too. It’s ugly because it’s a naive utterance, an unnecessarily violent call for action, from smart people who should know better. Destroying Hollywood would destroy a place that is far from perfect, but has created a lot of good, a lot of lasting good. A lot of good that even the fiercest file-sharing thief would readily admit is good. (Why would anyone steal something that wasn’t good?)

It has triggered discussion, at least. As MG Siegler points out, “the fallout from the failure of SOPA and PIPA is just as interesting as the main topics themselves.”

YC’s call to action is a road-rage response to the aggression of SOPA/PIPA’s drivers. Personally, I believe SOPA/PIPA advocates deserve pushback. The last thing people should seek is for a government or a special interest, in this case, intellectual property rights holders, to put civil liberties, and legitimate businesses, at risk. The tech industry spoke up and led an effective (at least for now) shelving of this proposed legislation. When the special interests are, by their own admission, paying off members of Congress to influence the outcome of lawmaking, we have a broken system. But that’s a huge topic that is beyond the scope of this immediate discussion.

Killing Movies and TV

Should movies and TV be killed? The YC article for all intents and purposes says so. They try to soften the blow by saying that it’s the movie and TV industries that should be killed, but in the same paragraph they go on to talk about killing movies and TV themselves, and replacing them with other, better, forms of entertainment.

First, a quick look at television. There is a lot of good television these days, more high-quality content than at any time in history. Anyone who’s paying attention would agree to that. But that said, personally, I choose not to watch television anymore, at least broadcast or cable television; I cut the cable over a year ago and haven’t regretted it for a minute, as the minuses (commercials, reality shows, all-news channels, vast quantities of worthless filler content) vastly outweighed the pluses, especially when the worthwhile content inevitably, albeit eventually, becomes available through other distribution mechanisms. I can wait. And I do. (Sometimes for years. I didn’t start watching THE WIRE until after it finished its initial run on HBO. I got it thanks to Netflix. Same with lots of other TV shows.)

As for movies: I do not want to see movies “killed.” I love, hell, I loff, oh, let’s face it, as Woody Allen would say, I lurve movies. I continue to go to tons of movies, year in, year out. Over 100 per year, in fact. So I am supporting not only Hollywood but more importantly, independent film. Think about it: $10 a pop, 100 movies a year, that’s $1000 a year. Add concessions every once in a while, say 1/3 of the time, that’s another $350 a year, straight into theatres’ pockets. This past week I’ve seen three movies, Stephen Soderbergh’s HAYWIRE (loved it), RED TAILS (worth going), and SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS (better than expected).

I completely and faithfully support filmmakers, whether their finished work be drama, action, adventure, comedy, art, documentary, whatever. I love it all (well, maybe not vampire flicks, but pretty much everything else). There’s nothing like good filmmaking and great storytelling. It is a magnificent art form. And, as MG Siegler rightfully points out, there are plenty of good movies, year in, year out, and the pluses of movies and moviegoing continue to outweigh the minuses. Now, there are minuses to moviegoing, oh yes. Lots of areas for improvement. I’ll come back to those later.

So YC wants to “fund startups that compete with movies and TV.” Fine. It’s nothing new. Half their already-funded startups arguably do that. Steve Case at AOL’s peak in the 1990s used to lament how movies and TV were AOL’s biggest competitor because if people were not online they were probably watching TV or movies. Whatever has the customer’s attention is what is competing, these days. Our attentions are pulled at, tugged at, enticed, tricked, prodded, dragged kicking and screaming, and fought for, a thousand times a day, maybe a thousand times an hour when we’re surfing the web. Every startup, Nettle included, wants your attention. More importantly, with the rise of blogging, social media, and social networks, every person seems to want your attention. So, everybody is competing with television and movies these days.

A Resistance to Change

Steven Soderbergh, aforementioned director of HAYWIRE and a long list of distinguished films, appears in the latest issue of Box Office Magazine with a fantastic interview.  Go read it.  The interview is mostly about HAYWIRE, but he does have some interesting things to say about the industry in general. His comments there have relevance here.

For starters:

If you made better movies, would more people show up? And often, the answer is, “What if sometimes when we do, they don’t?” It all comes down to economics, and the biggest problem right now is how much it costs to release a movie. And the fact that that drives the ticket prices, and the ticket prices are reaching the point where people aren’t willing to be as adventurous as they might be because they feel like they’re spending a lot of money—it’s not a cheap evening out any more. It gets into this weird paradox.

And this:

The lack of experimentation regarding ticket pricing is another thing that’s killing the business. This is nuts. There’s got to be some experimentation with this. There’s no analogous situation in any other business to theaters not experimenting with ticket pricing. Why I should be paying as much money for a movie in week four as opening day, I don’t understand.

The interviewer asks him, well, what would he like to see happen?

Something. Anything. Go into a market and try something for a month or two months. Just try something.

Soderbergh is basically arguing that movie theatres are resistant to change. He asks a great question: what other businesses facing rapidly-changing dynamics in their marketplace would respond to such changes with a “stay the course” strategy? All over the world, in every field, we’re seeing transformations, disruptive innovations, disintermediations, revolutions, evolutions: we’re seeing change. Just ask taxi drivers in San Francisco and New York. (They never saw Uber coming and now they’re freaking out and running to their lawyers and elected representatives.) 

Some movie theatres no doubt will say, “But we are changing!” And some movie theatres are. Impressively. Smart chains like Arclight and Alamo are doing all kinds of cool things to attract customers. And guess what? They’re expanding. In this economy! Movie theatre chains expanding to new cities. Who’d have thought it possible?

But I’m with Soderbergh when he sees too little happening in terms of flexibility with pricing, even a willingness to experiment.  Nettle wants to help fix that.

Resistance to change: I think the same can be said of the many aspects of the overall  “Hollywood” industry in general. They’re all for change, as long as everything stays the same. Hollywood has had “digital convergence” conferences for the last 20 years, touting and celebrating the transformation going on in their business. I’ve been going to them for the past 20 years, I’ve seen it first-hand. But at the end of twenty years, the resistance to change is still there, snarling and nasty like a cornered wolf, and it continues to hurt them and the market greatly.

Cornered wolves result in abominations like SOPA and PIPA, attempts to make bad law solve a problem that everyone agrees exists, but oversteps reason and good business and civil liberties and any sense of appropriate level of response.  Bad law is not going to help, it opens the door to inevitable abuse and unintended consequences, guaranteed to happen, absolutely guaranteed. History shows that over and over. So YC and the tech industry in general is right to push back. Technical and business model innovation is hard, but it’s where the entertainment needs to apply its focus, its energy, its fear, its passion, to address the theft and piracy of content. And it ought to do so in conjunction with, in cooperation with, with the full participation of, the tech industry.  The tech industry and the entertainment industry together will solve the problem.  Not apart.

Here’s Soderbergh:

The real thing that’s killing everybody is theft. This is why it’s very difficult to assess whether or not any of these experimenters could work or might work because theft is killing everybody. A lot of these ideas turn on the issue of true exclusivity. And if you can’t maintain that because of theft, you can’t innovate. As an elected official of the DGA, this is something that I’m very aware of and it’s really frustrating.

The Box Office interviewer responds with “There’s a whole generation that doesn’t even think of it as theft.” Soderberg’s response:

Well, that’s what we’re working to turn around. It’s the classic thing like when a parent says something to you that doesn’t resonate until you’re a parent yourself. That’s just the way the universe works. A lot of people who think, “It’s just a double click—what difference does it make?” are going to find that out when they try to go into a field in which they are creating stuff and their survival depends on people buying their stuff. They’re going to have a moment of, “Oh, s—t. The reason I don’t have a career is because people are doing what I was doing when I was young.”

An Open Question

Here’s an open question for Y Combinator, for the people who work at Y Combinator-funded startups, and for the Hacker News crowd in general: how many of you actively acquire music, movies, and television content for free, from torrent sources? I bet a lot of you. Maybe most of you. How many of you use EZRSS and EZTV to automatically grab shows?

I hear this from people all the time, they tell me they just watched so-and-so movie at home last night, and in my naivete I say, how’d you do that, it’s not out yet? Then I realize that TV is no longer TV. TV used to mean “television.”  Nowadays TV increasingly means “torrentvision.”

Everyone’s stealing content.  But as Fred Wilson says, people would gladly pay if they could.  For inexplicable reasons, content owners hold back and make the content unavailable, or available under inconvenient or difficult or expensive circumstances.

Here’s the thing. Would there even be a need for SOPA and PIPA if everything, every TV show, every movie ever made, every song ever recorded, were made available online, NOW, immediately, the moment you wanted it, for a reasonable fee, either pay-as-you-go or through subscription? I would argue not. Lots of others have been making this argument for years. What’s preventing the Celestial Jukebox from becoming real?

Give the market an easy, simple, affordable way to access HIGH-QUALITY content, and the market would gladly pay for it. I would for sure. Here’s Fred Wilson again, on this subject:

I’ve long believed that piracy is largely a business model problem not a human behavior problem. If you give people a legal way to consume the content they want, they will pay for it. But when you make it impossible to legally consume the content they want, they will pirate it.

Personally, I dislike going to Netflix anymore, as it’s always the same disappointing experience: browse the meagre offerings for streaming movies, discover it’s mostly made-for-video throwaway material. Why aren’t all the movies available?  Why cannot I watch what I want, right now? Through something very simple? And easy to use? (Probably not UltraViolet, which so far is none of the above.) I’d pay! I’d gladly pay! Millions of people would! Hollywood, and rights-holders everywhere, would be richer than ever if they simply made their content available. There will always be piracy in the world, but ponder this: Which would you rather have, a world with a few inevitable thieves out there but vastly more people paying for your content ALL THE TIME EVERY DAY FOREVER because the demands are being met, or, a world like we have now with limited content out there causing demand not to be met which only makes theft vastly more prevalent? As Fred Wilson says, “scarcity is a shitty business model.”

Getting from Fail to Win

Fear drives a lot of what’s going on. Fear, distrust, and ironically, a lack of creativity. Despite the fact that the entertainment business has some of the most creative people in the world working in it. It’s questionable whether the kind of innovation that would be required to fix this problem can emanate from the entertainment industry itself. For example, so far, UltraViolet is not blowing people away. It’s sending people away. Too big, too complicated, too many moving parts, too much control, too any restrictions. The result is probably #fail, big time fail.

I suspect the experience of Apple coming in and in the span of ten years becoming the largest seller of music is something the entertainment industry wants to avoid for movies and books. But it’s going to happen: it’s human nature, people want the stuff and they will find ways to get it.  As Jeff Goldblum once said in Jurassic Park, “nature finds a way.”  Nature, the market, will find a way to change the way content is distributed. It’s already happening big-time with books. (Not surprisingly, publishers are major sponsors of PIPA and SOPA.) Bookstores, who stuck for too many decades to an outdated consignment-store model, are going out of business in droves. Are movies next?  Not if I can help it.

Here’s what I would like to see. Content rights-holders should let lots of companies, large and small, distribute the content to consumers everywhere in a super-easy, very affordable way. Every song ever recorded. Every album. Every movie ever made. Every TV show. Where you want it, when you want it, for a decent price, in decent high-quality. Make the precious content ubiquitous, and it stays precious. The demand in the marketplace is met, and piracy fades into the margins.

Contempt Breeds Contempt

I’ve always been fascinated when companies neglect, ignore, distrust, dislike, or worst case, have downright contempt for their customers. And yet, one sees it everywhere. The phone companies are a great example. Go to any major carrier’s website. Try to get the thing done you need done. Give up? Call them. Get bombarded with recorded messages urging you to try their website (anything to avoid a human interaction with the customer). It’s exasperating.

Often the entertainment industry has behaved this way with consumers of content. They struggled to keep up with changing technology, made it difficult for customers to continue enjoying their existing purchases. You buy a VHS movie. Then laserdiscs come out. Then DVDs. Then blu-rays. Heaven forbid if one of your many collected movie recordings goes bad (how many of you remember laser-rot?). No recourse. Nowhere to turn. Nobody cared, not the studio that put the movie out, not the store you bought it from. And then comes along the ability to rip content right on to one’s computer. Get it into the digital domain, so you could have backups that you yourself can migrate as new technologies come out. Oh no, that’s piracy! Theft! You’re a criminal! How dare you make a backup of the 250 movies you bought at the store over the years, only to see them starting to rot away on the plastic discs we sold you, preventing you from watching the movies! No, you have to keep buying them over again!

It’s a contempt for the customer. And enacting bad laws, like the proposed PIPA/SOPA, reflects that contempt. Thing is, markets don’t like contempt. Companies that have contempt for the customer, that have customers who perceive contempt, are companies not long for this world. Markets see contemptuous companies as damage and route around them. Like they do everything else.

And so we have an industry in distress, perceiving threats from all sides, feeling cornered, feeling like its piece of the action is getting smaller and smaller every day, seeing the creators of the content more and more being able to find distribution on their own, cutting them out completely.

There is real theft taking place, for sure, content slipping out of Hollywood’s control and onto the Net and into the devices of people who never paid for that content, which does indeed hurt the creators of that content really badly. To the point where they often discover they can’t create more, it’s not economically viable.  Unless they find a way to work within the Net, the new game in town.

Not all consumers are thieves.  Having policies aimed at consumers collectively that reflect a general contempt for those customers is not a good way to go about things.

I see contempt for the customer in movie theatres too. Not everywhere, but in too many places. Some chains more than others. Usually it’s just neglect, stupidity, laziness. The worst conduct themselves as if they were fast-food restaurants, not chapels where people can flock to consider and contemplate the world and life through great storytelling. No, instead they conduct themselves as if they were fast-food joints serving the most over-priced, unhealthy food in the world, monetizing every shred of the moviegoer’s experience, from ads on the tickets at the box office, to promotions on the concessions, to commercials before the feature film, to turning even the “please don’t talk or use your cell phone during the movie” message beamed to the screen into a multiply-monetized moneymaker with slogans and logos and promos from other companies, all hitching a ride and taking advantage of the paying customers, the captive audience, sitting in there waiting for the damn film to start. What was it we came to see? Who can remember?

It’s enough to make the most die-hard movie fan have a serious love/hate relationship with the exhibition industry. It is unfortunate. The good news is, it’s correctable. Like always, look to the progressive, adventurous, daring, willing-to-try-anything theatres who love their customers and live to give them a good time, for positive solutions. Theatres that continue ignore and fail to adopt such positive approaches to being sustainable and viable in today’s distraction-drenched world do so at their peril.

Listen To Your Customers

So what can be done? Getting back to the movie theatre experience, here’s another great quote from Soderbergh:

There are a lot of things that could be done on the exhibition level that should be tried. When we go all-digital, what I’m hoping we’ll see is some version of the repertory cinema coming back because there’s a whole slew of great classic films—even from the ’70s and ’80s—that a whole generation has never seen on anything but a TV. Once everything is digital and it’s just a matter of putting something up on a server, a creative exhibitor going, “We’re showing The Godfather and Deliverance on the big screen Friday and Saturday,” I think there are people out there who would like to see those movies on the big screen because they never have. But the ticket cost is prohibitive.

Amen, amen, brother!

I can see theatre chains pushing back and saying, “We can’t fill the seats if we show reruns of old movies. It’s not what the public wants!”

To that I say, oh yeah? You sure about that? Have you actually given moviegoers the opportunity to tell you what they want? What if it turned out that there were 800 people in San Diego, right now, tonight, or 500 in Peoria, or 6000 in Manhattan, who’d gladly pay for a wonderful evening of BEN HUR, or GANDHI, or STAR WARS, or IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, or APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, or whatever, in glorious widescreen digital and blaring crystal-clear audio? You really going to turn them down? Why? If you can get the content out to the exhibitor completely digitally, no prints have to be made and shipped, just beam it across the Net right to the theatre, what’s holding you back? There is demand out there. You have a venue! Why not fill it with happy moviegoers? Right now, I’m in the mood to see BRIDESMAIDS again. I’d pay to see it again, in a big, crowded theatre full of laugher and cheer. I don’t wanna dial it up for streaming on the couch at home, or watch it on a mobile device.  I wanna go to the movie.

Regal Cinemas currently have a wonderfully effective clip that they show before their IMAX screenings. It starts out right in the middle of an action sequence of what appears to be some big Hollywood blockbuster film. Slowly, the image on the screen shrinks, getting smaller and smaller in the center of the screen, until it’s a tiny little image. They then fade in a what appears to be a computer monitor or living room flat-screen TV, and the action sequence continues, now with tinny monaural sound, on this little display. Suddenly, there’s a big explosion of sound and fury, with the motto, in massive letters towering over the IMAX audience, saying, “GO BIG, OR GO HOME.” I agree. It is a great message, well done.

Then again, my home theatre screen is twelve feet wide. (Projection, baby, that’s where it’s at. Flat-panel plasma/LCD/OLED, meh!)

I like that Regal gets it that cinemas need to GO BIG, but they should worry: not that the alternative is GO HOME, it is that, it’s GO BIG AT HOME.  Going big is not enough.  There is something else going on in a movie theatre, which is why I still go to movies at theatres all the time.  It’s the shared group experience.  This is the key, this is what movie theatres should make as good as possible.

But theatres in my town are falling apart and the experience keeps getting worse. I don’t want to stand in a long box office line that is long mainly because the box office personnel have been ordered to upsell the theatre chain’s loyalty program to each and every customer, including showing brochures and talking it up for many precious seconds, holding up the whole line.  Then there are the numerous auditoriums with stained, scratched, dirty screens.  And auditoriums with uncomfortable chairs, packed so closely together you’d think the airlines had a hand in their design.   And too often the picture is fuzzy. And dark!  You seen a digitally projected movie lately? Too many chains project digital without full illumination, as Roger Ebert has explained in great detail.  And too often the audio is less than great: a buzz throughout the screening, or a missing left channel, or an inaccurate mix, or no surround sound. The problems keep mounting. I have hope though. New theatre chains are moving into town this year. Great sound, great projection, no ads.  The market is responding.  (I cannot wait!)

Unfortunately too many cinemas seem think GO BIG means biggie-size the concessions, and while they’re at it, the biggie-size prices for the concessions too. This is, in my humble opinion, a huge mistake. Bad for moviegoer health. Bad for moviegoer wallet. Moviegoer not like.

What would happen if theatres REDUCED prices, increased quality, and bragged about it far and wide? “Come to our theatre. Our popcorn is fresh, low in sodium, and half the price of everywhere else. Come to our theatre twice a week and we’ll give you a free popcorn for your third visit.  Come to our theatre and have a great time AND save money.”  If a theatre sold twice as much and brought in twice as many customers, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Cinemas are missing out on a great opportunity to meet more of the demands of movie lovers. Why not do what Soderbergh suggests? Carve out some nights of the week to show some great movies from the past. Let your customers tell you what they want to see.

If I could see a crystal-clear, digital version of CADDYSHACK at a cinema, especially one that served beer and snacks, I’m THERE! I’d bring all my friends! And I bet thousands of others would do the same, in cities and towns around the country. I’d far rather experience a great flick with a highly-motivated, happy crowd that enjoys the group experience of a great movie theatre, than watch it at home. It’s not even the same watching stuff at home with friends. A great cinema always trumps the best home theatre.

Last year I spent some time hanging out with a major studio exec who said what he secretly hoped would come back is serials, in theatres, like in the old, old days. Produce a series, one hour shows, show ‘em once a week in theatres, for a subscription price. I’d go. I’d pay.

Here’s Soderbergh again:

Let’s talk about doing something to get people back into the habit of going to the movies regularly. I’m just saying ideology is the enemy of problem-solving. When you’re looking at something and you refuse to acknowledge a proposal because you ideological disagree with it, you’re never going to solve your problem. This is what I love about art, is that when you’re making a piece of art and you go, “S—t, we’ve only got this much time and this much money,” at no time does someone’s ideology prevent you from figuring out what the solution is. Nobody says, “No, we can’t shoot those two scenes because I’m Catholic.” It’s a pure creative space where everyone is just encouraged to throw out ideas until you figure out what the solution is. So what I see here is a complex set of problems that are not being solved and there’s stasis because of an ideology.

He’s right. The industry needs to find away to break on through this logjam.  Customers are waiting.

Innovate The Business Model, Don’t Kill The Industry

The Y Combinator posting generated a ton of commentary on YC’s Hacker News forum. One poster, going by the name “anactofgod”, responded this way:

One does it by changing the economics in a way that renders “Hollywood”, at least in terms of current studios-distributors-theaters (and studios-channels-Xcasters) model, untenable. The question to entrepreneurs that the original post should have concluded with is “What can you make that makes making and distributing engrossing entertainment (whatever form that may take) cheaper/easier/more accessible/more capable/more profitable/more easily funded?”

I thought this was an insightful comment, by someone named “Keyframe”:

Primary problem with producing movie/TV shows is money. It costs A LOT of money. Even shows you think can be done with a lower budget, it can’t… currently. Reasons for high costs are numerous and I can expand on them (and will if someone asks me), but lets take that as an axiom for this post. It costs a lot of money, which means people who invest in content production need to offload a lot of money and wish to guard their investment as much as possible, since that’s what it is - an investment in a project. Financing cycles and budgeting is as lean as possible in showbusiness, and a lot of money is involved both upfront for production and later when gathering yield. IF someone can disrupt financing side and securing measurable projected yield in this business - only then we will have a disruption. That is where one should look at for disruption, everything else is futile, because it’s as lean as possible.

It seems to me the answer is, how do we make new forms of distribution that better meet the demands of the market? Because the current model isn’t meeting those needs. And the keepers of the current model are getting down and dirty in an attempt to prevent change, while all around them the only thing that one can count on is change.

When I think about what’s happening in the entertainment industry, I’m often reminded of that great line from Shawshank Redemption: “It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”

Ain’t that the truth.

What Nettle is Doing

Instead of taking a destructive, “kill them” approach to this messy situation, we at Nettle are trying to do something positive. To be the change we want to see in the world.  We want to build tools and put pieces of technology together and innovate on business models so that in the end, more people go to more movies more often. At movie theatres.  That is our focus: the theatrical moviegoing experience, wedded to mobile, local, and social technologies.

I’ve often joked to venture capitalists when pitching to them that I would like them to give Nettle one billion dollars.  Just write a check for $1 billion: that ought to be enough to get things started. We’d start by buying a bunch of movie theatres, or building a bunch of them, all over the country. And we’d stick a really big pipe into them all, a fiber optic pipe, so that we could quickly get whatever customers wanted to see, and show it to them in amazing theatres. With great food at reasonable prices. To this the VCs usually chuckle. Haven’t found a VC who’s willing to write that billion-dollar check yet.

So instead, we’re trying to empower moviegoers, who are, after all, the real true customers of the movie industry. First and foremost, it’s moviegoers, showing up at a theatre, taking their hard-earned money out and buying tickets. People who love movies and enjoy seeing them together with an audience in a theatre. This is a group that has not been empowered. That can change.

But they’re not the only ones who are not sufficiently empowered. Theatres themselves could stand a bit of empowerment. They want to know who their customers are. If they want to stay in business, it’s critical that they form a better relationship with their customers, the moviegoers. We want to help there too.

Even the studios, the content creators and owners, benefit from what we’re doing. They too would fare better if they knew what their customers, the exhibitors and the moviegoers, wanted, when they wanted it. Who are these moviegoers? What are they interested in? What are they passionately waiting for? How do studios find that information out so that they can act on it? We’re interested in these questions and we are working on solutions that we hope answer them.

Rather than the Y Combinator slash-and-burn, nuke-‘em-from-orbit aproach, we think there is a better way. A way that involves stepping back, taking a deep breath, and looking at the entire ecosystem. In our case, the entire movie ecosystem. Well, at least the theatrical side of it. The theatrical movie ecosystem consists of three segments: moviegoers, exhibitors, and studios. We think the right way to make the whole situation better is to empower the whole ecosystem, but first and foremost, moviegoers. Build a product that better reflects the inherently social dimension of moviegoing.

We’re just getting started. Try out our MovieGoer app to see where we’re headed.

See you at the movies!

- Brian

Brian Dear / CEO / Nettle, Inc. / brian at nettle dot com