The Movie Subscription Service Sinemia Shuts Down, But Somehow MoviePass is Still Alive
For those of you who were subscribers to Sinemia, I’m sure you’ve learned by now that the service has officially shut down. What sucks is that last week I renewed my membership for a year and I know I’m not going to get that pre-paid money back. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty pissed off about it.
I actually liked Sinemia and thought they offered a decent service, unfortunately due to financial and legal difficulties they couldn’t keep going on. It’s interesting because everyone thought that it would be MoviePass that ended up dying, but somehow it has survived and is still alive!
When you go to open up the Sinemia app, this is the message that comes up:
Dear Customer,
Today, with a heavy heart, we’re announcing that Sinemia is closing its doors and ending operations in the US effective immediately.
As Sinemia, we set out our journey with the vision to help as many moviegoers as possible to enjoy an affordable and better experience at the movies by a creating a movie ticket subscription service that adds value for both the moviegoers and the movie industry. Since 2014, we’ve been fine-tuning our model and serving movie-goers with a slate of affordable and flexible subscription plans.
We are all witnessing that the future of moviegoing is evolving through movie ticket subscriptions. However, we didn’t see a path to sustainability as an independent movie ticket subscription service in the face of competition from movie theaters as they build their own subscriptions. Thanks to the cost advantage and cross-sell opportunities, movie theaters will be prominent in the movie ticket subscription economy.
While we are proud to have created a best in market service, our efforts to cover the cost of unexpected legal proceedings and raise the funds required to continue operations have not been sufficient. The competition in the US market and the core economics of what it costs to deliver Sinemia’s end-to-end experience ultimately lead us to the decision of discontinuing our US operations.
Despite the best efforts of our team, it has been difficult for us as a start-up to continue providing our services to the moviegoers in the US without resources and enough capital to meet increased operations and legal costs.
We want to sincerely thank our customers that believed in us and helped us along the way for their love and support.
We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to share our dream with you.
Sinemia Inc.
Well, it looks like I’ll be signing up with another movie subscription service. Most likely the AMC Theater service, which I’ve heard great things about.