If you’re a movie fan who misses the old Apple TV app for movie trailers, MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes knows your pain. So he decided to build his own trailer app that would allow viewers to easily track upcoming movies. But MoviePass Screening Room isn’t aimed at Apple TV devices or set-top boxes, instead Spikes quietly launched it in VR for Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro.
“I’m always in VR,” Spikes said in an interview with Engadget. “And when I saw how beautiful the Vision Pro’s images were and knew that Meta would soon catch up in the optical field, I just thought, ‘This is a great way to watch movie trailers.’ I said.”
But when I actually tried to watch the trailer in VR, I had to search YouTube and hope that I could actually find a high-quality version of what I was looking for. So why not launch his own trailer app, which would allow everyone to keep an eye on upcoming movies and could ultimately make it easier for MoviePass subscribers to book tickets? there is. “We wanted to grab attention” as people decide which movies to watch, Spikes said.
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In its current form in Vision Pro, MoviePass Screening Room is very simple. When you launch the app, you’ll see a list of trailers for recent and upcoming movies, including Sonic 3 and Mission: Impossible: Final Reckoning. Select a title and it will start playing almost instantly. Spikes said he gets trailers directly from Nielsen and from studios and marketing agency Paper Airplane. The goal is to obtain the highest quality possible. Often that’s 1080p, but some studios offer 4K options.
After perusing some of the trailers, I noticed that the bitrate and encoding quality was better than most YouTube services (especially noticeable when you scale the screen to movie theater size in VR). Masu). But mostly, I appreciated having one place to find high-quality trailers. Exploring YouTube on Vision Pro is still browser-based and clunky, with lots of low-quality videos and fan edits.
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When I asked if there was any data collection going on with the app, especially since Nielsen is the source, Spikes said: When you get into the world of data, you’re actually getting into the world of advertising, and that’s not where we’re going. ”
For me, watching trailers has always been a way to relax after a long day. The best of them aren’t just advertisements, they’re a glimpse into the magic of the movie to come. Spikes himself admits that he used to check Apple TV’s trailer app “religiously,” so it’s not all that surprising that he essentially wants to recreate that experience. MoviePass Screening Room is currently only available on Vision Pro and Meta Quest, but Spikes says he will eventually recalibrate the feature for Apple TV, Roku, and other platforms, adding trailers directly to the MoviePass app. He says he intends to do so.
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