Using the Starting 5 premiere to complain about 1iota

This is about sports! Sort of. - Amanda Golka

The best part of being my own boss and this being my Substack is I can change the rules whenever I want. So today I am using my live sporting events newsletter to complain about 1Iota at the Starting 5 premiere. 

It’s a basketball Netflix docu-reality show that counts. Even if it’s a thin connection. 

Starting 5 is the newest addition to the Netflix sports show universe. Netflix ordered several sports shows following the runaway success of Formula 1: Drive to Survive during lockdown. Shows include Full Swing, Break Point, Receiver, Nascar: Full Speed, and Sprint and Im sure others I can’t find because Netflix loves rolling out shows with little marketing budget. 

Starting 5 follows Jimmy Butler, Anthony Edwards, LeBron James, Domantas Sabonis and Jayson Tatum throughout the 2023-24 NBA season. The tagline says “DISCOVER THE LEGENDS BEYOND THE COURT”. 

Now frankly, I am not a big basketball girly, the most recent games I have been to have been WNBA games. My friend Marissa, however, is a sports creator and is a big Jimmy Butler and Anthony Edwards fan so when she asked me to be her plus one to the 1iota premiere event for Starting 5, I went. 

I also love the opportunity to put on a cute dress and be nosey but that’s neither here nor there. 

Now Marissa and I have both been to various events with 1iota. For those of you that don’t know the video that launched my Youtube channel involved me being a live audience member for a late night show multiple times via 1iota. I have been to multiple shows using them and screenings including the premiere of The Irishman with my Dad at the Chinese Theater. Now all those times were slightly different, but I always knew so long as I got into the priority ticket selection, I would be able to see the show and or movie. 

SO TELL ME WHY THIS IS NOT THE CASE NOW.

When I have previously gone to a premiere, we shall use The Irishman as an example here, they had us line up for the carpet in designated zones, they handed us posters and “I with Hoffa” buttons, and mostly let us be while actors, executives, and guests arrived and entered the theater. Then they let us walk through a whole fan section on the other side of the carpet and get photos before guiding us into the Dolby theater next door to actually watch the movie. 

For the Starting 5 premiere, when she invited me Marissa had told me that the tickets said that it was for the red carpet “experience” but that we would get to go see the the first episode of it if we were there early enough. 

Thennnnn day of that was removed from the digital tickets. 

So we get there early, wait in line for about an hour or so, I yelled at a man for making a young woman uncomfortable and insulting Marissa, and then we were escorted through the Egyptian to the black carpet fan zones next to the Netflix Store. We were all handed Starting 5 posters and a few sharpies were handed out to us. (Sidenote- you would think with how many of these things Netflix has done they would have specialty Netflix branded Sharpies by now). It looked like they ended up letting in all the Priority ticket holders as well as all the Standby people, and even then they did not fill up the fan zones. 

What followed was the most coached red carpet experience I have ever seen. They told us how to hold the posters, seemed annoyed when I folded mine and put it in my jacket pocket because I am not a signature person, and coached us on how to cheer and yell while they got clips of us doing so on various cameras and phones for the social media people. 

Marissa and I noticed that the public area outside of the theatre on the sidewalk probably had a better view of everyone coming in and getting autographs. We even saw two enterprising kids set up a whole autograph operation including watching them take brand new jerseys out of their shipping bags and lay them out for easy access on the barriers. They even had the Team USA jerseys ready to go. Spoiler alert, despite their cheering and screaming we never saw them get anything signed. But a valiant effort surely. 

What I also thought was weird was how few people were actually invited to the carpet. You had your Netflix execs and their kids (very funny to clock how employees acted when they were tasked with “keeping an eye” on said kids), a few athletes but not nearly as many as you would think would be there for a sports based show premiere, and what appeared to be one influencer and his partner. 

Periodically the DJ would come over the speakers and say “You can do better than that!” to get us to cheer for random people. Which I still find funny because if there is one group of people you don’t need to coach to cheer, it’s fans. But natural cheering in small quantities of people is pretty underwhelming in close proximity. 

Lebron James showed up in sweatpants and walked down the carpet without looking at anyone. Anthony Edwards showed up in a hoodie with a stain on it and we found later that it cost two hundred dollars, he also didn’t really stop till the end of the carpet. Jayson Tatum wore a khaki suit and signed a few posters. Domantas Sabonis arrived with his wife and was wearing a charcoal grey suit, also signed many posters. Then you had Jimmy Butler, who was wearing an all black outfit, joked with fans, complained about the sharpies and asked his assistant to “get his pen” which he then used to sign more posters, and finally started singing along to Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles with the crowd. (these are all definitely out of order of arrival by the way)

They had us stay even though no one else was coming through. I had told Marissa about how at the The Irishman premiere they had pulled a few people from the fan screening to go inside the main screening, and so when we saw people getting moved from the fan zone we thought that was what was happening. 

Except we saw them cutting off their wristbands. 

Apparently these people had just wanted to leave early. And so they clipped their wristbands on the way out. Finally they told us we could leave and that we would not being going into the screening which we knew at that point but we were still holding out hope they would let us in. 

We got a few photos with the Starting 5 logo at the opening of the carpet and began making our way around the theater to head to dinner because we both paid $20 for parking and we wanted to get something out of the evening. That is when we found another line leading to the theater itself. We approached the 1iota employee standing there and she stepped up to us already looking annoyed before we even asked what the line was for. 

“This is the standby for the screening. You had Red Carpet so you are done for the night,” she said. Assuming she saw our wristbands or had seen us in line earlier.

Which again, we knew. BUT this is so dumb. 

It can’t possibly be cheaper for Netflix or 1iota to do it this way. To have one group of people for the carpet and one group of people for the screening. You have even more employees working the crowds because you've separated them, more tickets to scan, just more people to deal with in general. The only thing I can think of why they think this is a good idea is if they think its easier to fill the crowd while the carpet is actually happening.

I assume they have been doing this for awhile and they are learning that when people find out they are only getting the red carpet they cancel their reservation. It is believed that 1iota as a platform does ding your account when you reserve something and don’t show up. Which later makes it harder to get selected for events and screenings in the future. But like I said the crowd for the red carpet was fairly small for the type of event it was, so I assume many people canceled last minute or just didn’t come. Marissa was certain the initial ticket mentioned if we got their early we could get into the screening. I assume they do that to try and get more people to come to the carpet. You know what else would get people to come to the carpet and stay the whole time? If they knew they would get to go watch the screening at the end of standing for multiple hours. 

This was a few weeks ago now. Starting 5 is out on Netflix and I still have not watched it yet. 1iota is annoying now.