A news story on my radio this morning said Regal Theaters are testing a system where patrons are issued ‘clickers’ with four buttons to have at ready while watching a movie. The buttons are supposed to be used by movie goers to alert management to problems going on inside a theater during their movie, including disruptive people and pirates with video cameras. It seems likely that if the clickers are effective the next step would be to use the cell phones of the patrons for these purposes — beaming a program into moviegoers phones as they enter the theater to equip them to alert management with a click or two on their own devices. This, of course, would require changing all those short film clips that we see before the main feature reminding us to silence our cell phones. New creative opportunities would abound to illustrate situations such as: ‘click 5 for a noisy neighbor,’ ‘click 6 for pirates with video’ and ‘click 7 for significant popcorn spill.’
Cell phones and movies: patron patrolling
- May 30th, 2007
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by Samuel Rose
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Comments
@ 10:02
I’ve not been in the movie theater for a while. I seem to remember some pre-short, about the horror’s of having your cell phone on while in the movie theater. How does this jive with the alert system. BTW, clickers idea sounds horrible. I’m there to watch a movie, not do the job of the theater employees.