cPass Cinema Ticket Subscription Service

Not FinTech at first glance, but I thought the way they’re implementing it is interesting.
(n.b. I don’t subscribe to this nor am I affiliated with them in any way.)

https://cpass.io/

For a monthly fee you get a card that lets you get one cinema ticket for free each day.
But they don’t have partnerships with the cinemas (yet?) and haven’t given the cinemas special equipment, it’s implemented currently with them giving you a standard bank card.

Presumably the card only does online transactions and will only authorise transactions from cinema chains and for the exact amount of one non-fancy/2D ticket in the relevant chain. Relatively clever way of doing it.

They say in their FAQ you can’t pre-purchase tickets, but if I did it at the box office rather than online, I’m not sure how they’d be able to tell. Nor if I worked out an exact combination of drinks/snacks that added up to the cost of one ticket, and on days I didn’t want to see a film, treated myself to some chocolatey snacks instead!

This is interesting, but I don’t see how this is a financially viable opportunity … Odeon for example charge ~£19 for their unlimited membership system. Even that restricts some London cinema venues.

I’d jump on this, even if I only went twice a month as you’d definitely get your money’s worth. Wonder if the cinemas will actually get on board with this though as most of them have their own membership system.

An interesting one to watch.

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Enter Brighton Post Code

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:man_facepalming:

Yeah I would agree that the financial viability is quite shaky!

I can get 2D cinema tickets for around £5-7 through a branded rewards website through my work (which I don’t think costs my work anything above a yearly setup), so the cinemas must be happy for tickets to be paid for at roughly that level, and I would hope that cPass would be able to get that kind of arrangement in place pretty damn quick, so they can gamble that most subscribers will see only 2 films a month.

If they truly have no arrangements with the cinemas at the moment, then they’re banking on people only seeing one per month, never mind their costs, never mind the fact that new subscribers will probably try to go all-out for a while at least … I hope they’ve got lots of startup cash reserves!

It’s interesting that it is only in London, but it does cover the West End cinemas.

Also, it says UK and Europe, but asks for a Zip Code (which is lazy, in my view).

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There is a similar thing in the US (https://www.moviepass.com/).

One can only assume (and I’m sure I read an article somewhere) they trade at a loss initially in the hope of being able to partner with either the cinemas or film studios in the future… or they’re mining everyones data (viewing habits would presumably be worth something to new ‘media’ players looking to develop original content - Netflix, Amazon Studios etc) and selling it on as an additional revenue stream.

Analysis here: https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/12/uk-cpass-moviepass-clone/

Is that worth it though? With meerkat movies you could easily see movies for only £2.50 each time.

I wish I had the time to be going to the cinema everyday…

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Interesting concept - too bad it’s London only!