Sinemia

» see sinemia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

sinemia had a turkish founder and a los angeles headquarters. that put it in a strange position from where i sat in ankara. rıfat oğuz had launched the service here in 2014, before any of the moviepass news cycle, and the early version was a calm monthly-ticket bundle that did not promise the world. the math on the turkish side made sense in 2014. a few movie tickets in istanbul or ankara cost less than dinner. you could sell a card that covered them and not lose your shirt.

when sinemia expanded into the us in 2017 to chase the moviepass moment, the math changed. us tickets are expensive, american subscribers run them hot, and a monthly plan that covers two or three tickets has to be priced honestly to survive. sinemia tried a middle path. cheaper than moviepass's nine-dollar unlimited offer but with caps and convenience fees, the convenience fees being the part that drew the lawsuits. by 2018 it had spread to the uk and australia on the same model, with canada following.

the unraveling came fast in early 2019. in march sinemia began mass-terminating accounts, claiming the subscribers had committed fraud and providing little explanation. people who pushed back were asked to send a photo id and personal information to recover service, which to anyone watching the broader subscription-app collapse season looked like an exit-scam pattern even if it was not framed that way internally. the app's rating cratered to one point one stars on ios as people downvoted in real time. the ftc opened an investigation. class-action suits piled up. on april 26 sinemia ended us operations, the next day it filed for bankruptcy.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the original turkish sinemia was the kind of small subscription product that works in a small market with low ticket prices. you paid a flat monthly fee, you got a bundle of tickets per month, the cinemas got reliable advance bookings, and nobody had to invent unsustainable economics to make the numbers fit. when the company chased the moviepass moment it inherited the moviepass problem of pricing tickets below their actual cost, then tried to escape that problem by adding fees and caps that customers experienced as a bait and switch.

~ the postmortem ~

sinemia did not run out of money on april 26, 2019. it had been quietly insolvent for months. the late-march account terminations were the visible part of a company trying to shrink its liability list by force, and the user-id requirement was a way to make recovery painful enough that most people would not bother. the ftc piece is the detail that matters legally. an open ftc investigation at the moment of bankruptcy is not how a healthy company exits a market. it is how a company exits a market in a way that prompts a years-long civil and regulatory tail.

~ the long tail ~

oğuz himself moved on quietly after the shutdown. the brand stayed dead in every market sinemia had touched, including turkey. for a turkish-founded company with a real domestic product, the international expansion is the part that killed it. there is a smaller, more boring sinemia that could have stayed alive at home and never tried to fight moviepass on its own continent. that version did not get to exist.

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