Exclusives

The data and analytics behind the business of premier movie-theater subscription service MoviePass will be the topic of the very first bi-coastal keynote address during both the Smart Content Summit West (Feb. 27 in Los Angeles) and Smart Content Summit East (March 8 in New York).

In Los Angeles, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, chairman and CEO of MoviePass parent company Helios & Matheson Analytics, will both be on stage to tackle the day’s keynote address “Innovation Across the Entertainment Industry; the MoviePass Effect.” Then on March 8 in New York, Farnsworth will provide the solo keynote “Disruption in the Entertainment Industry; Monetizing the MoviePass Effect.”

Helio & Matheson acquired a majority stake in MoviePass in August 2017, and then announced it would lower its subscription price for unlimited films to $9.95 a month, allowing subscribers to see up to one movie per day in theaters. Farnsworth said at the time that the service sought to increase the size of its user base in order to provide viewing data to content creators and advertisers. The subscription price reduction saw MoviePass subscribers jump from 400,000 to 1.5 million, as of January 2018.

Before joining MoviePass, Lowe was president and COO of movie kiosk operator Redbox, where he led the team from zero to $1.5 billion in revenue over eight years. Previously, he was a co-founding senior executive, and VP of business development and strategic alliances for Netflix, where he had originally served as Netflix’ entertainment domain expert, facilitating many of the early studio negotiations and subscriber acquisition programs.

In addition to being chairman and CEO of Helios & Matheson Analytics, Farnsworth is CEO of Zone Technologies, producer of the RedZone Map application, which seeks to enhance the personal safety of its users by providing real-time crime data in a navigation map format.

Zone Technologies is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Helios and Matheson, following a merger transaction between Helios and Matheson and Zone Technologies in 2016. An entrepreneur who has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, Investor’s Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on Fox Business News, Farnsworth is a private investor and equity partner in a range of other technology, hospitality and real estate companies.

2018 marks the fifth year for the Smart Content Summits, East and West, which provide market-specific updates on best practices, industry data initiatives and tools that studios, broadcasters and their business partners are using to make content more identifiable, accessible and useable.

Conference chairs for Smart Content Summit West and East include Nona Janssen Walls, SVP of data analytics for Lionsgate, Jason Lambert, executive director of content licensing and metadata for Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Mary Yurkovic, director of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance’s (MESA) Smart Content Council.

Other Smart Content Summit program topics and case studies will include:

• Smart Production Technologies at Work!
• Localization Gets Smart
• How Direct to Consumer is Changing the Rules for M&E
• Data, Marketing and Analytics – A New Paradigm
• Using Consumer “Watch Data” to Grow Your OTT Service
• AI in Action

To become a Smart Content Summit sponsor contact: Christian Calson at [email protected].

To register or find out more visit SmartContentSummit.com.