Sinemia Shuts Down US Operations
Sinemia has shut down its US operations. The movie subscription company posted the announcement yesterday on its website. You can read more about the service here. The abrupt closure came right before “Avengers: Endgame,” which was expected to be a box-office record breaker.
The company’s announcement does not say whether customers who paid for yearly plans up front would get partial refunds.
Sinemia says that “unexpected legal proceedings” are the reason for the shut down of US operations. Some customers filed a class-action back in November, alleging Sinemia ripped them off by introducing a new “processing fee.” MoviePass had also filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sinemia.
Sinemia said in March that it had terminated “approximately 3 percent of its accounts due to misuse or fraudulent activity.” But these users were suspected of just overusing the app, which meant that they weren’t ideal customers.
Sinemia was started in Turkey in 2014 and also operates in countries including Canada, Australia, and the UK. For now just the US operations have ceased. It’s not clear what’s going on in those other countries.
Here’s the full announcement:
Dear Customer,
Today, with a heavy heart, we’re announcing that Sinemia is closing its doors and ending operations in the US effective immediately.
As Sinemia, we set out our journey with the vision to help as many moviegoers as possible to enjoy an affordable and better experience at the movies by a creating a movie ticket subscription service that adds value for both the moviegoers and the movie industry. Since 2014, we’ve been fine-tuning our model and serving movie-goers with a slate of affordable and flexible subscription plans.
We are all witnessing that the future of moviegoing is evolving through movie ticket subscriptions. However, we didn’t see a path to sustainability as an independent movie ticket subscription service in the face of competition from movie theaters as they build their own subscriptions. Thanks to the cost advantage and cross-sell opportunities, movie theaters will be prominent in the movie ticket subscription economy.
While we are proud to have created a best in market service, our efforts to cover the cost of unexpected legal proceedings and raise the funds required to continue operations have not been sufficient. The competition in the US market and the core economics of what it costs to deliver Sinemia’s end-to-end experience ultimately lead us to the decision of discontinuing our US operations.
Despite the best efforts of our team, it has been difficult for us as a start-up to continue providing our services to the moviegoers in the US without resources and enough capital to meet increased operations and legal costs.
We want to sincerely thank our customers that believed in us and helped us along the way for their love and support.
We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to share our dream with you.
Sinemia Inc.
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Despite i lost my money, its Great to know that they are closing the operation in US. At least other won’t be cheated or wasting their time subscribing this utter stupid service.
I used this service only twice over 5 months and was shut down due to “fraudulent activity”. There was so much wrong with this service that I am happy to see it go away. I don’t expect to see my refund.
That explains why I kept getting errors when trying to sign up for the annual plan yesterday. I was lucky. I hope others get partial refunds.
I knew this was coming. When I read this article https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/sinemia-ceo-rifat-oguz-moviepass-alternative-problems-backlash-1202054570/ I knew the CEO was totally out of touch and lying and in denial. I hope he never gets a job again and never raises any investor funds again. Horrible CEO.