Will A Groupon-style Site For Movies Take Off?
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 22, 2011 8:40PM
If you're like us, meaning that you have considered submitting your own name for the "Gmail Inbox" episode of Hoarders and have also recently woken up and asked yourself "How many daily deal emails do I actually need?" then you may have been conflicted upon first encountering the phrase "Groupon-like website for movies" but it's safe to say you still signed up. Prescreen.com delivers a daily email to subscribers featuring the trailer for a movie not yet in theaters with the opportunity to stream it at a discounted price.
Prescreen tries to carve out a niche for the movie-hungry and tech-savvy in that overlapping part of a Venn diagram including social networks and daily deal sites. There is no minimum number of purchases required before the discounted movie is available, but after the first day the price doubles from $4 to $8 (movies are available for 60 days in total). The first 5% who pay to stream any given movie receive credits that can be used towards other movies. Inviting people to the site who end up purchasing a movie also earns you credit. The Groupon-ness of new startup is no coincidence: CEO Shawn Bercuson was formerly VP of Business Development at the start-up darling.
Many of the films now available on Prescreen are festival circuit titles that didn't lock up distribution, like today's film Chronic Town. Filmmakers receive 50% of the sales revenue if their film is chosen, and there's no upfront cost to them for submission or inclusion. If it helps get the word out for a few hundred overlooked films per year that can only be a good thing. Does it help us find something interesting to watch, though?
Thank the Tech Gods that Internet pipes got fat enough over the past decade to allow streaming video to emerge from its super-awkward RealVideo adolescence. Nobody wants to remember the choppy and compressed buffering of our suffering. It's too soon even to laugh about it. There is now no shortage of ways to stream feature-length movies. Big players like Netflix, Hulu and Apple add stock to their digital shelves by the terabyte, while smaller players, filesharing communities, and YouTube entertainment of dubious legality offer seemingly endless roadside attractions along the information superhighway. With such a vast array of options, the signal-to-noise ration suffers and it can be a challenge to find something you want.
If Prescreen can fulfill its potential role as curator, there's significant chance we'll be checking out the email regularly. However, the prices imply they are counting on the cachet of the films on hand being exclusive and ahead-of-the curve. $4 is not unreasonable for a streaming title though hardly feels like a bargain and $8 for a regular title is astronomical for a rental ... unless you value its newness or uniqueness. We'll keep an eye on them, if only to observe the epiphenomena of start-ups incubated in the heat thrown off by the Groupon skyrocket.