An Opinion on ‘The Minionator’
Andy Tarczon, Founding Partner, Corporate Development
July 9, 2010
Thursday evening I had the dual chance to both test out Best Buy’s Movie Mode app at a screening of ‘Despicable Me’ and be a hero to my six-year-old who could see this highly anticipated movie before any of his friends.
Best Buy hosted nationwide pre-release screenings for their Premier Silver RewardZone members in an effort to promote Movie Mode and ‘The Minionator’- an app-within-an-app designed to translate the mumblings of the little minions during the end credits. If you’re not familiar with either the app or this movie, turn on a TV to virtually any channel or read this VideoNuze piece.
Given all the advertising attention, the app has gained some traction with the Android Market listing 10,000-50,000 downloads. The software is also available for iPhone and Blackberry devices.
How does it work? As best I can tell, once the app is launched it listens for a synchronizing sound tone just before the film begins. This triggers several effects – both good and bad. The tone launches a timer on the app that also sets the phone into a silent mode (good). However, my screen was locked on and wouldn’t dim or standby (bad). Looking around the theater, lots of phones were shining away.
Because this was a special screening, there were no previews (really good) and no direction on when to launch the app (bad) – so a good portion of the audience was unable to follow along as the app didn’t launch in time and never triggered. If you don’t have the app, the antics on the screen are pretty meaningless.
I’d also gone from hero to zero as my boy looked at me in sheer disappointment when he couldn’t get the translations and interactivity he’d been looking forward to. The experience left a worse taste in my mouth than another failed promotion - Coke MagiCans. Okay, bad pun. I’m hoping this won’t be the case in actual screenings...
I applaud the effort to tie several components together – creating new promotion channels, audience interactivity, and just keeping our damn phones quiet. But it also showed a bit of a dichotomy for how powerful our phones have become.
All of the invitations and email leading up to the event clearly stipulated: “By attending, you agree not to bring any recording device (including certain types of mobile phones which have recording capability) into the theater.”
While clearly an effort to block piracy, Android, iPhone, and Blackberry all qualify as having recording capabilities. So anyone who brought a phone into the event that was promoting Best Buy’s Movie Mode app also violated the terms of the screening.* Myself included.
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For more on this issue of consumer video piracy, be sure to join my TDG colleagues in-person as we unveil the results of a recent study on DVD and Blu-ray disc copying and peer-to-peer/torrent downloading of premium content. We’ll presenting in New York, London, and Los Angeles later this month. Details.
*NOTE: Best Buy is checking into the issue and has promised a comment. In addition, an updated version of the Movie Mode app is now available which may alleviate some of the issues I ran into.
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