I was on the road all week doing college visits. Heading down the road while enjoying the fall foliage and at the same time anticipating the impending doom on my wallet. The air was crisp, the sky winked that winter was coming and the squirrels and birds were all working furiously trying to horde seeds and nuts for the up and coming cold. Things were changing and changing rapidly.

At a way stop on Tuesday, I checked my phone and saw that AMC announced that it was launching its own streaming service. My initial reaction, my gut reaction, was here they go again stabbing the exhibition in the back but I began to think about it deeper.

Stepping back, AMC Entertainment Holdings the largest movie theater chain in the world, announced it would be the first U.S. theatrical exhibitor to launch a digital movie service, AMC Theatres on Demand. The company explained in a press release that starting this week, members of its Stubs loyalty program in the U.S. would be able to rent or buy more than 2,000 of the most popular digital movies from a variety of top studios, via its website AMCTheatres.com, the AMC mobile app, or Roku-enabled smart TVs. Movie purchases and rentals will allow members to accumulate Stubs points that can be used toward in-theater rewards.

What I began to see within AMC was a desperate need to maintain a relevant position in the motion picture market. This was not a service that was going to impact Amazon or Netflix much, in fact, it was a proposed service that by its design was finite. This decision made clear the sad fact that if theaters were to have future relevance they had to find their place within the streaming universe.

Since the rumblings of the slow exit of Wanda Dalian, AMC has been trying to prevent any further erosion of its stock price. It has seen a rapid decline and needed a story to hold up its stock price and allow it to raise more money on Wall Street. There was nothing in the AMC story to provide inertia for its stock. This streaming offering at the very least could inject some life into a company that has been inflected with capricious stockholders and highly inflated self opinions of itself.

These quotes from the stock website The Street lays out what the challenges AMC has as well as market opinion.

AMC trades at 49x forward-looking earnings. It has seen book value drop by 18.7% over the past twelve months — and for you accounting majors, now runs with a Current Ratio of just 0.68. What that means to me, sports fans, is that these guys live with the potential of running into obstacles in meeting short-to-medium-term obligations. Not that they will, but they could.

The firm will report its third quarter on October 31. Expectations right now are for EPS of somewhere between $-0.40 to $0.45, down from $-0.33 for the third quarter of 2017. Revenue is projected to grow just slightly from $1.18 billion to $1.19 billion, suggesting to me some margin issues going forward.

Obviously the movie theater business lives at the intersection of both the “experiential economy” and the “stay at home economy.” Both of these trends claim hold on the millennial generation. That said, there is no denying that the broader business has been in general decline.

Like Cineplex and its brilliant leader Ellis Jacob,along with his dedication to move his theaters into the experiential camp, AMC decided that betting the farm on the exhibition business was not sound in the least. What is really interesting is that this strategy of streaming does not seem to be dedicated to attracting customers, it seems to be solely dedicated to retaining their customer base. I scratched my head again about this, I know the streaming service they were about to launch was going to cost plenty, but it also would allow the studios to let everyone know that they still loved the business of exhibition. Well if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you. But there had to be a bigger reason for placing an apparently limited streaming offering in your quiver. A lot of very rich companies were spending a lot of money to launch their streaming businesses. I thought about it some more.

Then it hit me, with its unstable ownership and its stock prices that were all over the board (price did rise due to the streaming news though) they were positioning themselves for something, they wanted to show someone an increased value of integrating theaters and streaming services. In short, they are preparing themselves to be more appealing, a more alluring company. It is common knowledge that Wanda Dalian wants out and out fast. The folks back home in China were none too happy with the acquisition of AMC and have for awhile have been screaming at them to get out.

Now another thing that I found odd is that if traditional streaming outlets were looking more and more at advertising-supported streaming offering why would AMC rely on transactional VOD. Something still did not make sense to me.

With a STUBS membership base of 2.2 million, AMC is really hoping to convert a significant amount to these members to users of the proposed streaming service. Again eyes were on Canada’s Cineplex that already offered an on-demand service.

This is just conjecture for me, but if AMC was to possibly shrink to 400 locations and if they could really attract viewers to its streaming service then maybe a wholesale acquisition might be interesting for the right player, maybe even a company that is struggling to find its place in the streaming universe like Apple.

Imagine a company which included upmarket retail environments, experiential offerings like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality as well as movie-going and streaming, that model actually could have a future. A strong future.

I think this is just the start of a series of key moves for AMC. I for one will be watching keenly. Times are getting really interesting.