Monday, January 7, 2019

MoviePass: The Ongoing Saga (Part 17 of ?)

This week the main story has been MoviePass' product manager resigning.

He didn't go down quietly, either. Did some mighty raging against the dying of the light, calling their leaders' behavior "completely thoughtless, but also incredibly tone deaf" and reveals that morale at the company "worsens and worsens, with no end in sight."

Just like the service on MoviePass' app!

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Meanwhile, Sinemia is working great for me!

I scored two tickets at the theater with my physical card and also tried the advance ticket feature. It worked fine, but don't forget to check in on the app once you arrive at the theater. It's easy to get distracted. This is a distracting world.

The advance ticket purchase process is a bit of rigamarole with some extra steps, this site can walk you through it if you need it. Once you do it once, you're set.

There's a $1.80 Sinemia fee for advance tickets, but if you go to Facebook Movies and then check out with Atom Tickets for your ticket purchase, there are no additional fees beyond that.

Also if you buy four tickets through Atom Tickets, you get a free movie ticket. So do the math there on four $1.80 fees and you end up paying $7.20 to get a bonus movie. That's a bargain matinee price, so good deal!

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And to give you the simplest possible explanation on how to sign up and start using Sinemia, here you go:


Head to Sinemia and...
-select the $8.99 3-a-month plan for a full year
-sign up
-once you're signed up, go to your account on sinemia.com and select the “Membership" tab
-on that tab, select "Order a physical card"
-order the card for $14.99
-Download the Sinemia app, so you'll have it
-WAIT. Don't pay any early activation fees or cardless activation fees.
-In about three weeks, when your card comes, choose "Activate Physical Card" on the app on the day you're ready to use it.
-Go to the theater and arrive BEFORE your desired showtime
-Select the "Watch" tab
-Enter your showtime, submit it to get your card loaded with funds
-Buy your ticket
-Check In on the Sinemia app. It will remind you to do so. Make sure you click on the movie you're seeing.
-Enjoy your movie! Three times a month! (And Sinemia don't mind if you want to watch the same movie repeatedly, so watch Holmes and Watson three times a month, if you like!)

Now you may scoff at paying $14.99 for the physical card. That's the only fee I advocate paying. But do the math and you'll find that over the course of a year, it comes out to $1.25 a month. So you're ultimately paying $10.25 a month for three movies.

That's 30 cents a month more than MoviePass for the same number of movies and, unlike MoviePass, you can actually use the service to see any movie at any time.

(Full disclosure: the Sinemia app briefly crashes every now and then, which can make checking in at the theater tricky. But if you email customer service with a screenshot saying you tried to check in at the theater but were unable, you should be fine.)

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As for our household, we still have one MoviePass account. My wife's. It's hanging by a thread. All MoviePass has to do is make their service one iota worse, or try to raise the monthly fee, and it's canceled.

In a world without Sinemia, MoviePass could get away with their horseplay.

But this isn't a world without Sinemia.

Get it together, MoviePass. We had too many good times together.

I don't want to have to end this.

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-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

I wrote the book on MoviePass TWICE, once from a positive perspective, and once from a more realistic perspective. I also wrote a horror book about a sort-of evil MoviePass.

My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon hereI exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.

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