
Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee - danso
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/moviefone-bankruptcy-value-1203505129/
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jedberg
My first thought of course was the Seinfeld episode, which they convenient
linked to at the end of the article:

[https://youtu.be/qM79_itR0Nc?t=15](https://youtu.be/qM79_itR0Nc?t=15)

I wonder how much that one person gets paid to basically double check the
monitoring. I hope they have another task to keep them busy.

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flavmartins
Same. Anytime you hear "movie phone" you immediately have to say, "why don't
you just TELL me the name of the movie you'd like to see?"

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zw123456
It proves again that there is a Seinfeld episode for everything.

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ravenstine
The other day, I had a conversation with my parents about the cultural impact
of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and we couldn't think of any other shows that
top them in that way. Old episodes of both shows are still memeable to this
day.

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barry-cotter
The Simpsons have nothing on post WWII tv shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It To
Beaver etc. When there were very few tv channels and after when some tv shows
played on repeat forever anytime the networks needed something to fill a slot
you’d get something close to saturation of knowledge of characters and
situations. Even for wildly popular series like GoT this will never happen
again. The consolidated audience isn’t there. For a brief post war moment
there was accidentally a TV canon.

~~~
statuehectic
If we're talking globally though, I don't think anything has ever had (or will
ever have again) the global saturation of The Simpsons. I Love Lucy and Leave
it to Beaver never had international success and existed at a time when TV
wasn't as globally popular. Even within the US, Leave it to Beaver never broke
into the Nielsen Top 30. Meanwhile in many countries, The Simpsons got the
treatment you're talking about. I grew up in Australia, where at least 7
episodes of The Simpsons have aired in primetime per week for almost 30 years,
and for half that time most people only had 3 commercial channels. I just
checked the TV guide, and it's running from 6:30 PM to 9 PM tonight on network
TV and airing 6 episodes throughout the day on cable. If you're under 45, The
Simpsons saturated popular culture during your youth, and the same is true for
friends and colleagues from around the world. 40 year old Mexicans and 4 year
old New Zealanders know the same show in a way that was never true for Lucy or
Beaver.

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cannam
I've never heard of Moviefone - can anyone explain why a phone and dialup
service is a "relic of the high-flying dotcom days"? Was there an internet
component?

The article offered me plenty of ads, autoplaying video, and cookie popups,
but it didn't quite answer that.

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jahlove
Doesn't quite answer your question, but this was AOL's reasoning at the time
[0]:

> In a statement, Bob Pittman, president and chief operating officer of
> America Online, said: "MovieFone will add an exciting new area of local
> e-commerce to AOL and our other brands. By putting AOL's resources behind
> MovieFone, we will substantially enhance its already impressive performance
> and revenue potential," he added. MovieFone, which is expected to be re-
> branded after the deal as AOL MovieFone, is one of the nation's largest
> movie-listing and ticketing services with deal with 17,000 screens in 42
> cities nationwide. Dulles, Va.-based America Online also nabs the online
> version MovieFone.com, seen as a complement to Digital City, AOL's local-
> listing service.

I read that "dotcom days" sentence to be more in reference to dotcom day
valuations than anything else.

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150402181940/http://money.cnn....](https://web.archive.org/web/20150402181940/http://money.cnn.com/1999/02/01/deals/moviefone/?iid=EL)

~~~
Razengan
> dotcom day valuations

I still see those bizarre valuations in things like "Hasura raises $9.9M to
simplify GraphQL"

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TaylorAlexander
I see all this money thrown around for the chance of profit (but most likely a
loss) and I just really wish we had more open source funding. I’d take the job
in a heartbeat if I could work full time in open source.

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ficklepickle
Anybody remember "talking yellow pages" or something called "hotline 2929"?

It had movie listings as well as some choose your own adventure style games
played with the keypad.

I'm not sure if it was local, or a Canadian thing or what. I sure spent some
time on those games, though. It was also the way we got movie listings.

Edit: managed to find a link. It was aka "audiotex". Apparently this was
popular for a minute pre-internet, with newspapers also getting in on it.

[https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Collision+course%3A+the+battl...](https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Collision+course%3A+the+battle+for+revenue+between+newspaper+audiotex...-a011413240)

~~~
wtn
I grew up in the USA, and My hometown newspaper offered that service. I played
the interactive games. I think the content refreshed every week.

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harrisonjackson
I used to love it when my parents called moviefone when we were headed out on
a family outing. Now we book seats through an app that lets us watch trailers
and pick the best seats available for any new release - very cool - but I do
miss some aspect of moviefone and the even older method of looking in the
local newspaper to see the movie times.

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ALittleLight
I tend to think that the things we do during childhood take on a happy
nostalgic glow. Perhaps your parents feel the same way but substituting
looking up movies in the paper for "moviefone" and "moviefone" for the app.
Your children, in turn, will fondly recall the time when they used an app as
opposed to having their movies arranged automatically by their AI assistant,
but just like you continue to use the app, they will continue to use the
assistant.

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ficklepickle
And his grandchildren will be nostalgic a habitable environment.

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jdofaz
I have no fond memories of moviefone, aside from the annoying voice it would
make you listen to trailers. The newspaper used to have a free service called
pressline that would give me the same info without the annoyances.

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onetimemanytime
>> _Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee_

I'll never sell!!! My business /idea is worth a gazillion, billion trillion.

Things change, cashing in your chips might work sometimes

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GekkePrutser
Oh that's a blast from the past. I used to use this all the time for testing
international calls.

"Welcome to Moviefone, brought to you by the new york times!"

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triangleman
And Hot 97

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LameRubberDucky
I wondered what happened. It used to be my go to place for movies but it just
kept degrading. Now I go to Fandango.

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sonicxxg
Did I just travel to an alternative dimension? Moviefone, Fandango? Never
heard of any of these names. Are they supposed to be big brands?

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LameRubberDucky
Well they were at one point. I'm a bit of a dinosaur, so I was alive before
either of these existed. I'm left wondering what people do now. Have an app
for each theater perhaps?

Edit: I don't believe sonicxxg deserves any down-votes. After all, everyone
doesn't know everything. Obligatory xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

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arshbot
"movies near me" in Google, or look at rottentomatoes.com for good rated
movies

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LameRubberDucky
I was thinking Google might be it. I do this in Google Maps on my phone, but
thought maybe even Google Maps was passe these days.

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dvt
It would seem trivial to pivot Moviefone into a film rating website. I wonder
how difficult it would be to disrupt Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic.

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riazrizvi
Trivial? Trivial to build a site, populate it with critic content for each
movie, as either text or scores that seem credible to a particular audience
type? Or trivial to carve out market share from Rotten
Tomatoes/Imdb/Metacritic?

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dvt
Both really, but I meant the latter. People don't really trust Rotten Tomatoes
(and IMDb and Metacritic are memes at this point). I'm sure Moviefone's parent
company has a few mil to spend.

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flafla2
Maybe you should read the article. The full headline is:

"Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee After
Parent Company’s Bankruptcy "

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justlexi93
1% is still $4,379,504 so whoever it is they're apparently doing a pretty good
job

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downerending
Sadly, it's not the "You have selected _regicide_." guy.

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triangleman
I think it's worth noting that founder Russ Leatherman is still doing well for
himself; for instance, he apparently has a syndicated radio spot called "Six
Second Reviews".

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peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"Meanwhile, tucked away in the bankruptcy filing was the disclosure that the
net book value of Moviefone’s intellectual property is estimated to be
$4,379,504. That’s just 1.1% of AOL’s $388 million stock deal for Moviefone in
1999, right before the internet bubble burst."

Amazing how some companies can devalue faster than Venezuelan currency...

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Traster
Actually, Moviefone lost 99% of it's value in 20 years. The Venezuelan
Bolivar's inflation rate was 130,000% in 2018 - or to put it another way, it
lost 99.999% of its value in that single year.

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peter_d_sherman
I stand corrected! <g>

