The Movie House App's Death Spiral

 It was a little over a year ago I saw ads on Pluto TV for "the Movie House" that promised free "premium" movies if you watched.  It sounded like a scam but I was intrigued--and bored--so I installed the app on my Roku to check it out.  And as I wrote, it was misleading but not a scam.  I mean, you didn't get free movies, just $5 credits at Vudu or Amazon.  Those couldn't buy--or in most cases even rent--the "premium" movies but the gift cards could be used for anything on Amazon so I started using the app and using the $5 credits on my ordinary purchases.

At first you just got points for watching movies but after a few weeks they added a wheel you could spin once a day and after 5 spins you got a bonus gift code.  At the time I'm writing this in January, I made $490 in gift cards since the previous April.  Which is pretty cool.  On the dates listed, you can see there are a lot of times when I got two gift cards in one day or maybe just a day apart:

Your Gift Card Code History

• Tue Jan 24 2023
• Wed Jan 18 2023
• Sat Jan 14 2023
• Mon Jan 09 2023
• Thu Jan 05 2023
• Sat Dec 31 2022
• Sun Dec 25 2022
• Tue Dec 20 2022
• Fri Dec 16 2022
• Sun Dec 11 2022
• Mon Dec 05 2022
• Mon Dec 05 2022
• Wed Nov 30 2022
• Fri Nov 25 2022
• Fri Nov 25 2022
• Sat Nov 19 2022
• Sat Nov 19 2022
• Mon Nov 14 2022
• Sat Nov 12 2022
• Thu Nov 10 2022
• Mon Nov 07 2022
• Thu Nov 03 2022
• Tue Nov 01 2022
• Sat Oct 29 2022
• Sat Oct 29 2022
• Tue Oct 25 2022
• Mon Oct 24 2022
• Fri Oct 21 2022
• Wed Oct 19 2022
• Tue Oct 18 2022
• Fri Oct 14 2022
• Thu Oct 13 2022
• Sun Oct 09 2022
• Sun Oct 09 2022
• Mon Oct 03 2022
• Mon Oct 03 2022
• Wed Sep 28 2022
• Wed Sep 28 2022
• Fri Sep 23 2022
• Fri Sep 23 2022
• Mon Sep 19 2022
• Sat Sep 17 2022
• Tue Sep 13 2022
• Tue Sep 13 2022
• Thu Sep 08 2022
• Wed Sep 07 2022
• Sun Sep 04 2022
• Thu Sep 01 2022
• Wed Aug 31 2022
• Mon Aug 29 2022
• Sat Aug 27 2022
• Tue Aug 23 2022
• Sun Aug 21 2022
• Wed Aug 17 2022
• Tue Aug 16 2022
• Fri Aug 12 2022
• Fri Aug 12 2022
• Tue Aug 09 2022
• Sun Aug 07 2022
• Fri Aug 05 2022
• Tue Aug 02 2022
• Mon Aug 01 2022
• Thu Jul 28 2022
• Tue Jul 26 2022
• Fri Jul 22 2022
• Thu Jul 21 2022
• Sun Jul 17 2022
• Wed Jul 13 2022
• Sun Jul 10 2022
• Sun Jul 10 2022
• Thu Jul 07 2022
• Sun Jul 03 2022
• Sun Jul 03 2022
• Tue Jun 28 2022
• Tue Jun 28 2022
• Fri Jun 24 2022
• Thu Jun 23 2022
• Sun Jun 19 2022
• Sun Jun 19 2022
• Wed Jun 15 2022
• Sun Jun 12 2022
• Sun Jun 12 2022
• Wed Jun 08 2022
• Thu Jun 02 2022
• Fri May 27 2022
• Fri May 20 2022
• Mon May 16 2022
• Mon May 09 2022
• Fri May 06 2022
• Mon May 02 2022
• Mon May 02 2022
• Wed Apr 27 2022
• Sat Apr 23 2022
• Thu Apr 21 2022
• Sun Apr 17 2022
• Fri Apr 15 2022
• Tue Apr 12 2022
• Sat Apr 09 2022

But what you might notice is after December 5th there are no more of those double days.  Why?  Because they stopped giving you a free gift card with 5 spins.  Instead they only gave you 50% added to your completion bar.  The added kick in the pants is that the 50% won't carry over.  So if you have 90% already, you only get 10% of that 50%.  That might motivate you to turn on a movie or two so you can get to 100% before the 5th spin.

But by the time they downgraded the wheel, they had downgraded most of their movies to the point of being worthless.  I mean most of their movies are already pretty worthless from an entertainment standpoint, but by December, the longest movie--a rodeo movie from 2018 called Cowboy & Indiana--was only worth 3.88%.  By April it was worth only 3.27%!  Most of the movies that are in the 70-90 minute range would be worth less than 2 points.  So if you want to get that 10% to round up your completion bar, you can either watch C&I 3 times or watch 5-6 other movies.  It's kind of a lot of work.

This is the classic death spiral of failing businesses.  Take that most prominent example:  the post office.  They're losing money so they raise the price of stamps.  There might be a slight bump as people rush to get "Forever" stamps at the old price, but inevitably they start losing money again so they have to keep raising the price of stamps.  The more they raise prices, the fewer stamps they actually sell.  Between that and technology making for less and less need to mail things with postage, it's a death spiral that has been going on for decades.

You see this death spiral with non-government businesses that are going under.  A department store like Sears, Kmart, or now Bed, Bath, & Beyond starts closing locations to save money.  The fewer locations generate less revenue while inevitably the savings from the shuttered business don't offset the lost revenue. (And of course we can't have crappy executives cut their salaries or bonuses.)  So they close more locations.  In most cases the cycle continues until there's nothing left of the business.  Though I talked about B&N, which had seemed like it was entering into that death spiral, managing to pull out.  Few businesses do manage to do that; instead the downward momentum ends up crashing them into the ground.

In the case of the post office, we can mostly blame computers for fewer and fewer people mailing stuff.  With most retailers we blame Amazon.  Some like Kay-Bee Toys and Toys R Us we can blame unscrupulous capital firms.  Others like Steve & Barry's college merchandise outlets, Hill's department store, or Love's furniture stores you can blame expanding too quickly. (In the weird case of Love's, they bought a whole bunch of Art Van Furniture stores that were going out of business, but within about six months the Love's stores were also out of business.  Most of those then got sold to Gardner White or Value City furniture stores.)

But there are usually also some missteps or poor business practices.  The post office is notorious for shitty service; I think we've all witnessed this first-hand.  KMart couldn't meet the price, selection, or service of its competitors like Walmart and Target.

With the Movie House app we can see a few poor business practices.

1.  Bait & Switch:  the whole concept of the "premium movies" sounded like a scam.  And while it wasn't really, it was pretty much a bait & switch.  You show up thinking you'll be able to watch Everything, Everywhere, All At Once or The Batman but instead you have to watch movies you've never heard of to get a gift card that might pay for half to a quarter of one of those "premium" movies.  So if you're already wary that it's a scam, this will make you more inclined to feel that way.

2.  Low Selection, Not Updated:  There are probably less than 100 movies on the app you can watch, plus TV episodes, so it's not a huge selection.  A lot of "free" movie apps like Tubi TV, Crackle, or Popcornflix have a lot more movies/TV to choose from.  And adding to the problem, the Movie House doesn't add new movies very often.  They added a few around the holidays--that then disappeared again after the holidays.  I would say that in the last six months they've actually lost more movies than they've added.

3.  Low Quality Selections:  What you notice right away when browsing the app is that you'll have heard of exactly 0 of the "Standard" movies.  There are a few more professional offerings like Grand Theft Parsons or Like Sunday, Like Rain featuring real actors and decent production values.  But 99% of what they offer is stuff that would be more at home on the Rifftrax app than Netflix.  (In the case of Feeders, it actually is on the Rifftrax app!)

4.  Poor Tech Support:  There's already a limited selection of movies and many are pretty low quality in terms of acting and production values.  But then you have some that are low quality technically.  I noted in one "Stuff I Watched" entry I wanted to watch the movie The Architect, but while the video would play, there was no sound!  There are a few more like that.  There are others that don't play at all, like basically the entire "Urban Entertainment" section.  And weirdly there are a couple with software watermarks still on them, which makes me wonder if they're even the final version or a rough cut that someone somehow obtained.  I made mention of some of the affected movies to their email but never received a response and none of the movies were fixed or removed.  Even Cowboy & Indiana, which I put on all the time, has a weird aspect ratio because they basically use a full screen version instead of the widescreen on Amazon/Freevee:

Amazon on the left, Movie House on the right

5.  The Ads Debacle:  Usually when a streaming service like Disney+ or Netflix announces ads, people are pissed.  When the Movie House revealed it was going to have ads, I was actually happy.  Ads might mean they could upgrade the site or even get some new movies.  You know, correct the death spiral.  But instead of using the same ads that everyone from Disney+ down to Popcornflix uses, they went it alone and used some stupid ad system.  So for over a week if you played a movie every two minutes you'd have this commercial shouting, "V.O.T.E., VOTE!..." at you.  Every two minutes on the dot.  The same fucking commercial every time.  I mean, try watching a movie when every two minutes it does that.  It's fucking terrible.  (Plus, I had already dropped off my ballot so contrary to what Trumpers think, I had done the maximum amount of V.O.T.E.Voting that I could do.)  After a while I had a Pavlovian reaction where I'd be like, "Oh God, has it been two minutes?"  I emailed them that why don't they do like 2 ads every five minutes or so?  Then people could get into the movie a little more.  Maybe I wasn't the only one because they attempted to do that.  Attempted.  Except then the ads didn't work!  It'd just stop the movie to a black screen for a few seconds.  And while I should be happy, it kinda defeats the purpose of having ad breaks when they don't play.  Plus sometimes it'll cause the Roku to crash.  And I doubt it's bringing in any money to upgrade the app or get more/better movies.  The whole thing was just a mess.

Later, I started to wonder if it's that the ads don't work or simply that they haven't been able to get any sponsors.  Which seems almost impossible, doesn't it?  I mean you'd have to be really incompetent not to find any businesses who want to sponsor your app.  Even when Pluto TV started they had weird local ads, which were kinda cool because you could see ads for a dentist in Arizona or jewelry store in Florida.  Anyway, if cut-rate apps like Popcornflix and the like can have ads, I don't know why they can't manage it.

So in large part because of these factors, the app is in a death spiral and if it's not dead yet, it probably will be before the end of the year.  What I really wish would happen is one of the bigger apps would buy this out and adapt the concept.  I mean it'd be great to get rewards for watching stuff I want to watch anyway on Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, Amazon, or whatever.  Or one of the free ones like Tubi or Crackle might want to try it to see if they get more people to watch stuff.  I mean most of these apps right now are just trying to compete by adding content, often desperately mining IPs to draw eyes.  A rewards program would be a way to get views without having to actually spend the money to license an IP and create a show.  It seems so obvious that I don't know why no one is doing it.

Anyway, it's another example of how a business can fail.  Might be an interesting case study for business textbooks.

UPDATE:  The end really might be here as May 6th I got the 100% and never received a gift card code.  I emailed them and got a terse reply basically gaslighting me saying, "all eligible gift codes for movies were sent out today."  So, what, you're saying I'm not "eligible?"  I did the same thing and got the same email as 120 times before only this time I never got paid.  And after that email they just stonewalled me with a boilerplate FAQ.  I put them on notice that if this happened the next time I'd stop using the app because really what use is it if you're not getting paid?  The next time I reached 100% I got a gift card like a minute later.  The same for on Wednesday when I hit 100% again.  So maybe my warning worked?  Or not.  Still, it's something to keep an eye on.