Case Study: Village Roadshow uses pandemic shutdown to digitally transform

The entertainment industry screeched to a halt during COVID with cinemas and theme parks closing their doors, and hotels largely filled with guests in quarantine.

While the sector was one of the hardest hit, some businesses took the time to rebuild for a post-pandemic world.

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Digital Nation Australia spoke to Michael Fagan, Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow, one of Australia’s largest entertainment companies with over 85 million customer visits to its cinema screens every year, pre pandemic. According to Fagan, when the business reopened its doors to customers in November it was the first time in 600 days that they had every cinema screen in the circuit open.

In order to prepare for the reopening, Fagan says that the organisation spent the period of closure innovating, and launching a range of new services, one of which is the digital, real-time ‘living ticket’.

“Taking what our customers have told us, which is, ‘tell me what's going on’, we built an interactive cinema ticket, providing live data about their session,” says Fagan.

Village Roadshow also implemented a locker pickup for food and beverage which eliminates the need for a traditional candy bar. Instead of queuing and waiting, customers can digitally order from their phone and the bar staff will place the order in a locker that the customer can scan a digital receipt to open.

“It's a very frictionless experience and we're the first, certainly the first in cinemas worldwide… We have seen it at one football stadium in the US so we're probably not first the world, but we are first in Australia.”

The organisation is also trialling direct to seat ordering, says Fagan, but is working to ensure that it does not negatively impact the customer experience.

Innovations at Village Roadshow, including the living ticket are powered by AWS. Before moving to the provider, the organisation’s tech infrastructure was largely on premise. According the Fagan, the motivation for change was strong.

“We wanted to improve the agility, we wanted to reduce our cost of service so that we could remain competitive, we wanted the high availability and extensibility via cloud, we wanted the ability to scale and the ability to integrate all the different initiatives that we had. So really cloud is the answer to that."

Before moving to AWS, Village Roadshow had a famous incident on Boxing Day 2019 with the opening of Avengers End Game. Fagan says its on premise systems did not cope with the surge in demand.

“It's not great to disappoint your customers at any time, but also for all the internal team who are working, Boxing Day is probably not the day you want to be trying to fix a critical fix.”

After rearchitecting all front-facing websites with AWS, the organisation was able to test the offering with the recent release of Spider Man No Way Home, which saw Village Cinema’s second busiest hours in terms of transactions and customer visitations to the website in its history.

“We knew it was going to be big, but we didn't know it was going to be that big. So we started getting alerts as it's designed to do, saying ‘we’re starting to reach the upper level of our capacity’. And we can just slowly see resources being added automatically in AWS.”

“We ended up having 10 times the traffic that we normally have, and it just auto-scaled beautifully.”