Skip to main content

Goodnight, Sweet Prince: MoviePass Finally Dies



MoviePass, the business by Helios and Matheson that would be our film savior after slashing its initial price from nearly 50$ for Unlimited Movies to a mere 9.99$.

Alas, the dream has died.

The change drew a flood of new customers - and left competitors scrambling for ways to implement their own movie subscription service. As of this writing, AMC Stubs is a runaway success, and Regal Unlimited is still in its infancy.

I have neither, as both plans arrived after our theaters were shuttered from Hurricane Michael. The AMC will not reopen, with no word on the Regal.

The app, from secondhand reports, seemed glitchy, with poor location-realizing services. Despite this, Studio Movie Grill did team up with the service to implement food ordering from the app.

Less than a month ago, MoviePass had a data breach of unencrypted customer card numbers. Even though the card was essentially a prepaid one you could only buy tickets with at theaters, that's never good protocol.

They didn't die because they had a data breach - Multiple large business expose us every day that are still ticking - but because they simply ran out of money.

With the influx of new customers,  Helios and Matheson had to pay out for each ticket. At 9.99$ a month, they were banking on people using the service once or twice a month - and were losing a lot of money.

They did change requirements, from 'All times, all 2D movies', to certain movies during certain times - A futile effort.

In the end, they simply could not raise the funds. You have until September 14th, 2019 to get one last movie in - if you can.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H
Post a Comment
Read more

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory
Post a Comment
Read more

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.
Post a Comment
Read more