If you’re a cinephile who misses the old Apple TV app for movie trailers, MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes knows your pain. So he decided to build a trailer app of his own, one that could easily help viewers keep track of upcoming films. But the MoviePass Screening Room isn’t heading to Apple TV devices and set-top boxes — instead, Spikes quietly launched it in VR for the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro.
“I’m in VR all the time,” Spikes told Engadget in an interview. “And when I saw how beautiful the imagery was in the Vision Pro, and I know Meta is going to catch up pretty quick on optics, I just said ‘This is a great way to watch movie trailers.'”
When he tried to actually watch trailers in VR, though, it involved searching through YouTube and hoping he actually landed on a high quality version of what he was looking for. So why not launch a trailer app of his own? One that could help everyone keep tabs on upcoming films, as well as eventually make it easier for MoviePass subscribers to book tickets. “We wanted to be top of mind,” Spikes said, as people determined which films to watch.
In its current form on the Vision Pro, the MoviePass Screening Room is fairly straightforward. Once you launch the app, you’re presented with a list of trailers for recent and upcoming films like Sonic 3 and Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Select a title, and it begins playing almost instantly. Spikes says he acquires trailers from Nielsen, directly from studios and from the marketing agency PaperAirplane. The goal is to get the highest quality possible — in many cases that’s just 1080p, but some studios offer 4K options.
After perusing several trailers, I noticed that the bitrate and encoding quality looked better than most YouTube offerings (it’s particularly easy to see when you’re blowing screens up to the size of cinemas in VR). Mostly, though, I just appreciated having a single place to go to find high quality trailers. Exploring YouTube on the Vision Pro is still a clunky browser-based affair, and it’s also filled with tons of low-quality videos and fan edits.
When I asked if there’s some sort of data collection play with this app, especially since Nielsen is a source, Spikes replied, “We do not intend to go down that path. We see it much more as expanding our own ecosystem. And, you know, when you get into the data world, you’re really getting into the advertising world. And that’s not the space that we’re headed into.”
Watching trailers has always been a way for me to wind down after a long day. The best of them are more than just ads, they give us a brief glimpse of cinematic magic coming on the horizon. Spikes himself admits that he used to check the Apple TV trailer app “religiously,” so it’s not a huge surprise he essentially wants to replicate that experience. While the MoviePass Screening Room is only available on the Vision Pro and Meta Quest at the moment, Spikes says he intends to retool it for the Apple TV, Roku and other platforms eventually, as well as add trailers directly into the MoviePass app.
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