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If you’re a moviegoer who misses the old Apple TV app for movie trailers, MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes knows your pain. So he decided to create his own app, which would help viewers to keep track of upcoming movies. But MoviePass Screening Room isn’t going to Apple TV devices and set-top boxes — instead, Spikes has quietly launched it in VR for Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro.
“I’m in VR all the time,” Spikes told Engadget in an interview. “And when I saw how beautiful the images were in Vision Pro, and I knew that Meta would get the optics faster, I just said” big a way to watch movies.’
When they tried to watch the video in VR, however, it involved searching on YouTube and hoping that they reached the highest quality of what they were looking for. So why not start its own program? One that will help everyone keep track of upcoming movies, and make it easier for MoviePass subscribers to book tickets. “We wanted to be more thoughtful,” Spikes said, as people choose which movies to watch.
In its Vision Pro form, the MoviePass Viewing Room is straightforward. As soon as you launch the app, you are presented with a list of latest movies and upcoming movies like Sonic 3 and Mission Impossible: The Final Countdown. Choose a title, and it starts playing right away. Spikes reportedly gets trailers from Nielsen, directly from studios and from advertising agency PaperAirplane. The goal is to get the highest quality – usually limited to 1080p, but some studios offer 4K options.
After watching a few trailers, I noticed that the quality of the bitrate and encoding looks better than what YouTube offers (it’s easier to see when you broadcast the screen to the size of movies in VR). For the most part, though, I’m just glad to have one place to go for great trailers. Browsing YouTube on Vision Pro is still a bit of a drag on the browser, and it also has very low quality videos and fan updates.
When I asked if there was some kind of data collection game with the program, especially since Nielsen is the source, Spikes responded, “We don’t want to go that route. We see it as expanding our ecosystem. And, you know, when you get into the world of data, you’re really getting into the world of advertising and that’s not where we’re going.”
Watching trailers has always been a way for me to unwind after a long day. Better than a commercial, it gives us a brief glimpse of the movie magic coming on the horizon. Spikes himself admits that he used to watch the Apple TV trailer show “religiously,” so it’s not too surprising that he wanted to emulate the experience. While MoviePass Screening Room is currently available on Vision Pro and Meta Quest, Spikes says they plan to update Apple TV, Roku and other platforms eventually, as well as add trailers directly into the MoviePass app.
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