Siri, Where's My Movie Seat?

I grew up with this concept of “first come, first seated” at music concerts and softball games and at the movies. It was unwritten etiquette for many public events. Assigned seating? That was for mass-commuter airlines and live Broadway theater events.

But most of the movie chains like AMC, Cinemark, Century and Landmark converted to the practice over the past year. It’s upsold in some theaters as “VIP seating” but more commonly called “reserved seating” when done online. But why, to what end? I’d never considered that red-eye flight to Chicago or shelling out to see the touring company of “Phantom” in the same league as going to the movies. The whole concept of sit-by-the-numbers to see “Justice League” struck me as conceptually itchy.

Now, I know the movie theaters are struggling to keep their profits. Anyone who’s media aware understands that Netflix and Hulu and other streaming services are giving Millennials their entertainment fix in a new way. Sure, there are pressures on the industry -- big studios make their greatest share of money from a smaller selection of films, and movies are burning out at the box office more quickly. There was a recent article in Bloomberg pointing out the number of screening days it takes movie to earn 90 percent of its total box office haul keeps shrinking — for top films that figure stands at about 30 days, down from 40 days just two years ago.

Movie theaters have met challenges in the past, as when network radio exploded in the 1930’s and consumers could sit at home in the living room and hear superstar performers for free. Or in the 1950’s when the same effect, this time with television, sent movie theater attendance plummeting. 

So movie theaters today need to get more people in the doors more rapidly. After all, herding and crowd control are now a mainstay for the airlines, why not apply that model to entertainment?  Make the customers (1) book themselves in advance; (2) pay premiums for seating options. Columnist John Kelly, writing in The Washington Post, details how online ticketing pushes more of the transaction costs back onto the consumer -- including printing the ticket and processing the transaction. Can you say "United Airlines"?  Topping it off, we have to pay a “Convenience Fee” surcharge for this dubious honor.

But that same Bloomberg report pointed out that switching to reserved seating may make it harder to sell out shows — if customers see that the only seats left are those in the front row, they may put off buying tickets to shows they otherwise would see. Instead of the old model — going out with several friends on a Friday night, but finding out you can’t all sit together after buying tickets at the box office — instead you can find out when you book online and decide to do something else -- maybe come back next Tuesday night.

Reserved seating doesn’t mandate booking online in advance, old farts like me can still walk up to the ticket window on a whim. But this reserved seating system only works if EVERY seat is reserved, including walk-up point of purchase. So now the cashier gestures me to a tiny LCD screen full of boxes and rectangles and tells me to pick my seats from those still available. The tiny icons don’t translate spatially, and if I’m with Lynne then it becomes something to discuss because we make decisions together. All this means lines move slower as patrons ahead of you hash out all details of this seat versus that seat. If the movie’s not sold out, this kind of delay is just plain aggravating for those of us in the queue.

And If you’re willing to buy online and reserve ahead of time, then you’re no longer motivated to arrive before the show starts. Getting a good seat used to mean showing up early. That doesn’t work for Millennials, they prefer the assurance of walking into the theater at the last minute and having the seat they've selected waiting for them. Does this make one feel like a VIP -- when you can call "dibs" and later stroll in and sit down just as the studio and distributor logos hit the screen? Apparently so, since it’s called “VIP seating”.

After the lights go down and the show’s actually started, late comers are at best disruptive, at worst antagonizing, stumbling over seated patrons while trying to get to that one specific magic chair. For those of us used to the old first-come, first claimed model, mitigating this friction could take a while. Who referees disputes between latecomers who reserve seats online, and those traditionalists who would rather buy tickets early on site and hunker down in the best seats?

And those best seats are really getting the luxury treatment. Upgrading to plush recliner-style seats also means fewer seats fit into each auditorium. As Julia Humphrey writes at the Odyssey online site: “For what would normally be a row of about 12 to 14 stadium seats, around 7 luxury seats take their place. For each row of luxury seating, about one row of stadium seating is removed. So one row of luxury seating takes away the potential for around 20 more people. Those 20 people no longer have the opportunity to go catch a big blockbuster when they had the chance. Those 20 people are money lost for production studios and, assuming they buy concessions, a lost source of revenue for theaters.” 

Someone eventually will pay – theater chains, lead by AMC, will only wait about a year after upgrading theaters before raising ticket prices again to cover their remodeling costs and reduced capacity.

Sure, reserved seating can eliminate what the industry calls “holdout lines,” those long queues waiting outside the theater for exiting moviegoers to leave the previous showing. On the other hand, nearly 6 percent of overall revenue at AMC and Regal theaters comes from on-screen commercials before the movie starts. But without movie goers arriving early to snag the decent seats, no one’s there to watch advertising and commercials before the main show. Movie theaters are caught between wanting people to show up early (because they make extra money that way) and making it convenient (so that people don't decide just to watch things at home). Here’s the online sales pitch from one regional theater chain in the midwest:  “Avoid lines, arrive anytime knowing you have a great seat, sit exactly where you and your friends want, and reduce seat-saving anxiety by reserving a large number of seats for your family or friends.”

What’s scary? Theaters now have the technology to charge more for those seats with a better view of the screen or discount the crap seats. Or charge additional for seats with extended leg room, replicating the torture-based model used by most commercial airlines. And the software running the "seating and ticketing" operating system has all sorts of coded surprises in place, awaiting activation at some future date.  Ability to tier seating prices, charging more for the optimum sweet spots in the middle of the theaters.  Accept electronic tipping payments to employees and bonuses for cashiers for successfully up selling higher-tiered seats. Tracking and demographics. It’s not happening right now, but I’ve seen the screen shots intended only for theater managers and executives – check out the industry supplier RTS Ready Theatre Systems, if you don’t believe me.

With enough pre-sold reservations, theaters can dump those "dark" intervals in between screening times. With enough seats pre-purchased, let the poor schmucks arrive late and stumble around in the dark as features roll back-to-back-to-back. And what about the traditional loyal movie patron? With all seats reserved, if you play by their rules, then you’ve lost all control of mitigating obnoxious patrons who end up sitting next to you. What if someone tall sits right in front of you? It used to be easy to just quietly get up and move down a few seats.

Reserved seating might actually prevent me from deciding to go out to a new movie at the last minute, as most seats would have already been reserved. 

Is the escalated ticket price for perceived luxury worth this hassle? Hand me my remote, I’m staying home tonight.

Slack of Focus in a Sports Bar

Somehow, an epiphany on photography came to me while in a sports bar.

Not one to frequent such places, but one such establishment recently opened down the street. Promoting their “chef driven menu” two of us decided to stop by for happy hour. We were seated on the open-air upper deck, a view to the mountains on one side but a plethora of gigantic flat panel displays visible to the other. Several home theater-sized screens presented that day’s episode of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” studio-based sports talker.

I never watch this stuff normally. A couple years ago we cut the cord because Comcast, and later DISH network, kept forcing unwanted sports programming down our throats and escalating our monthly bill to cover their increasing programming fees. Enough was enough, we bought a Roku box with "no commercials" options to Hulu and Netflix. "Screw you, Comcast, always the United Airlines of cable consumer customer service."

But this kitchen was slow and the service lagged and my eyes drifted to the big screens. These things pushed all limits of current flat panel tech ... I have friends with driveways smaller than these monsters. Disinterested in the muddled verbal content of SportsCenter, my attention pulled me to the compromised clutter of the ESPN studio set design.

The set design itself not much, a very high-tech desk and behind it a matrix of very large flat panel displays, matrixed to show a cacophony of graphics and stats and athlete head shots and game clips, all dissolving and morphing like a sack full of cats. Fonts and and logos swirl and transmogrify faster than chameleons on amphetamines. All this as ESPN studio personalities sit and yammer among themselves. 

This was the premium content for which ESPN and Comcast so dearly bill each month?

Their studio production not a “set piece” in the traditional design sense, instead more a camera pointed at giant studio monitors displaying motion graphic content that could have just as simply been pushed out directly to viewer homes from the CG generator itself. ESPN was apparently insisting I watch my screen, fed from their camera pointed at another ESPN screen. Live human "hosts" reduced to clutter trapped between the studio camera and what that camera was REALLY capturing, which was simply more screens. The traditional background had become the conceptual foreground. It looked awful. There was no focus. Or more literally, the focus was everywhere all at once.

It made me long for the old days, when a big news set filled the television studio. Where space and distance could be used creatively and artistically, because physical laws of light, lens and optics never change. With larger lenses and bigger cameras (depending on the level and intensity of the studio lighting) at normal distances something is in focus, and stuff in front or behind is out of focus or “soft” visually. Having the background fuzzy helps visually isolate and reinforce the newscaster or anchor. It mimics our real life experience where our brain and eyes concentrate attention on what we want to see, and diffuse our perception of the extraneous stuff. 

But laws of optics also demand that as lenses get tinier and tinier, this depth of field effect grows less and less pronounced. With any lens miniaturized enough, EVERYTHING captured appears in focus and sharp. This may be a good thing for amateurs with smartphones, but bad for traditional esthetics and tasteful scenic design.

Today, small cramped studios with a desk with a panorama of flat panels immediately behind is a solution both quick and cheap. And cheap is the enemy of good. A stylish physical space for a television news or sports show does not come with an Ikea price tag. Designing and building physical walls and columns and arches and backgrounds requires human labor and craftsmanship ... to do it well is expensive. Once management commits to such an expense, those costs have to be amortized over several years. Make no mistake, even a bevy of 8-foot LCDs is cheaper than physical studio construction. Plus anything, any image, any signal, any graphic can electronically feed these screens. Want a completely different set? Boom, new graphics, done deal.

But with the LCD wall background only a few feet behind hosts and the guests, everything now sits within the same field of focus. Screens can’t be selectively soft because they’re too close to the talent. And besides, says the show’s producer, if we’re paying for all these graphics then by god, they’re gonna be sharp and not wasted as fuzzy, soft blobs floating somewhere behind the talent.  It’s become the new norm. Flat panels are versatile. Cheaper than physical set construction. Instantly changeable. What does it matter that the space and depth and selective focus that naturally go with it have disappeared?

Apparently it does matter. I ask you to consider that with great fanfare, Apple now offers with iOS 10.1 their “Portrait Mode” on iPhone models 7 Plus and higher. What does “Portrait Mode” do? It uses that regular “everything is sharp” iPhone photo from that nearly pinhole sized lens, and crunches it with software and algorithms to recreate the traditional depth-of-field effect. That same effect that happens naturally with larger lenses and formats now can be recreated via raw processing power. Irrelevant that what was once normally there now must be artificially restored because, as Apple puts it, “a beautiful new feature creates stunning photos … make your foreground subject sharp while creating a beautifully blurred background, also known as “bokeh” and previously only capable on DSLR cameras.” 

Wow. Just … wow. You don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone. So now, the esthetic value of selective focus ... lost when lenses were miniaturized for smart phones ... can be restored or at least approximated via battery-draining computer processing. 

Will this mean that SportsCenter can invoke some semblance of artistic merit by applying software to “soften” the background and restore desirable beautifully blurred backgrounds to premium cable? Of course, the very same thing would happen automatically by just physically moving that wall of screens further away from the anchor desk. Moving the background so it’s actually “more in the background” allows simple optics to solve the visual problem.

But that’s the photographic revelation, that we’ve come to the point where an OS upgrade can insert what used to occur naturally. And until ESPN and all the other studio news and talk programs recognize their banal and disposable of pablum is merely filler between desperately overstuffed commercial blocks, then the larger problem of corporate focus will not disappear into the background anytime soon.