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Movie theaters will look vastly different if they survive COVID-19:
thanks to mass closings and skyrocketing debt for theater franchises during COVID-19, the future of the businesses that offered me so much comfort as a teen is in peril. In uncertain times, one thing seems increasingly clear: The theater industry must change to survive. Here's how movie theaters might look in the future.
[...] Sure, companies like AMC hated the super cheap subscription-based app Moviepass, but the subscription model is an increasingly popular and time-tested method of ensuring revenue -- some theaters in the UK have been using such services for more than a decade.
[...] Drive-in theaters, which thrived in the '50s and early '60s, are already finding a second (or third) life amid the pandemic, thanks to the built-in social distancing and -- for the reason many of them still survived before COVID-19 -- nostalgia.
[...] How exactly this will look remains to be seen, but tech and streaming giants like Apple, Amazon and Netflix have either considered buying theaters or already committed to doing so. While wholesale corporate takeovers are probably a long shot, Silicon Valley has the capital to buy out floundering theater franchises and incorporate them into their existing integrative business models -- and doing so could dramatically reorient the movie theater landscape.
Or, more of them could serve food and beer like Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 19 2020, @11:06AM (1 child)
I was just considering the more likely interaction between theaters and VR: VR headsets allow a virtualized theater experience (for movies or plays) and people stop going to the real theaters. Pick any seat in the house, move your head around to see everything if you are up close. You could even do what driverless hates and simulate the noise and talking, by networking with friends or strangers for synced viewing, and positioning the audio streams based on locations in the virtual environment (don't forget a per-person mute feature, or maybe automatic filtering of annoying coughs).
Bringing VR into the real world is an interesting idea, although it's not happening during a pandemic. Companies like StarVR market their headsets for "high-end enterprise applications and location-based entertainment". But your movie theaters weren't going to succeed with "location-based entertainment". Instead, it should be the laser tag and paintball centers that have any chance of monetizing VR. Most people aren't going to have an Omni treadmill at home, and don't have a lot of space to move around in without hitting their head on the coffee table and dying [soylentnews.org]. Get a field or a warehouse, set up some cheap obstacles, rent out headsets and equipment. Maybe use some 5G "picocells" [5gradar.com] to send data to the headsets.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @12:33PM
Laser tag with good AR/VR would be amazing! With some standardized maps, you could have worldwide multiplayer competition.