If you're a movie fan who misses the old Apple TV app for watching movie trailers, MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes knows your pain. So he decided to create his own trailer app that could easily help viewers keep track of upcoming movies. But MoviePass Screening Room won't be available on Apple TV devices and set-top boxes – instead, Spikes has quietly launched it in virtual reality for Meta quest and Apple Vision Pro.
“I’m in virtual reality all the time,” Spikes told Engadget. “And when I saw how beautiful the Vision Pro images were, and I know that the Meta would catch up with the optics pretty quickly, I just said, 'This big way to watch movie trailers.”
However, when he tried to watch the trailers in virtual reality, it involved searching YouTube and hoping that he actually found a high-quality version of what he was looking for. So why not start your own trailer app? One that can help everyone keep track of upcoming movies, while also ultimately making it easier for MoviePass subscribers to book tickets. “We wanted to be the center of attention,” Spikes said as people determined which films to watch.
In its current form on Vision Pro, the MoviePass movie theater is pretty basic. Once you launch the app, you will be presented with a list of trailers for recent and upcoming movies, e.g. Sonic 3 And Mission: Impossible: Final Reckoning. Select a title and it will start playing almost instantly. Spikes says he sources trailers from Nielsen, directly from studios and from marketing agency PaperAirplane. The goal is to get the highest quality possible – in many cases this is just 1080p, but some studios offer 4K options.
After watching a few trailers, I noticed that the bitrate and encoding quality looked better than most YouTube offerings (especially easy to see when you blow up the screens to the size of VR cinemas). Mostly, though, I just appreciated having one place to go to find high quality trailers. Exploring YouTube on Vision Pro is still a clunky experience in the browser, and it's filled with a lot of low-quality videos and fan edits.
When I asked if there was any way to collect data using this app, especially since Nielsen is the source, Spikes responded, “We're not going to go down that route. We see it more as an extension of our own ecosystem. You know, when you get into the world of data, you actually get into the world of advertising. And that’s not the area we’re heading into.”
Watching trailers has always been a way for me to unwind after a long day. The best of them are more than just advertisements, they give us a glimpse of the cinematic magic on the horizon. Spikes himself admits that he used to check the Apple TV trailer app “religiously” in the past, so it's no surprise that he essentially wants to repeat the experience. While MoviePass is currently only available on Vision Pro and Meta Quest, Spikes says he intends to eventually retool it for Apple TV, Roku and other platforms, as well as add trailers directly to the MoviePass app.
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