Reading Cinema’s success story
Reading Cinemas are a global company and one of Australia’s top four cinema chains, providing high-value, premium quality cinema experiences. One of the defining features of the cinema industry is fluctuation. Websites can have a low level of activity one week, with traffic at an all-time high the next. As we saw with the Barbie phenomenon, a movie can be an unexpected blockbuster, sending tens of thousands of customers racing to buy tickets online – with traffic dropping again once the rush ends. This leads to a highly variable server load and associated ramifications for costs and performance.
This was the scenario Reading Cinemas was navigating. Technologically ahead of the game, they started searching for a solution to solve their immediate variability problems whilst also building infrastructure that would carry them into the future.
Going serverless and changing the game
In a typical cinema environment, providers need to pay for a certain number of servers to host what they predict the maximum usage will be. For example, if six active servers are standard on an average week, ten might be needed when a large movie is released. However, there is guesswork involved. In the words of Reading’s Global IT Director, Kevin Rispin: “If you get it right, great. If you overestimate, you end up paying for capacity you don’t need – if you underestimate your website goes down and you lose sales – there’s a lot of manual intervention involved.”
In conjunction with a new website build, Reading Cinemas decided they wanted to evolve beyond having their web developers manage their AWS environment to make it fully scalable and automatic. They had two key requirements:
- Serverless infrastructure – to allow for minimal maintenance and more efficiency.
- Fully scalable and automatic – to remove the guesswork of estimating expected web traffic and associated performance implications.
Essentially, they needed a bespoke environment able to support a low baseline while being able to scale up to 10,000+ users rapidly with no manual input. Enter PolarSeven.
PolarSeven expertise for a customised build
PolarSeven worked with Reading Cinemas to develop and deploy a serverless web application on AWS, leveraging various technologies, including JavaScript, Python, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Bitbucket, and AWS CodePipeline, SQS. The project aimed to create a robust, scalable and cost-effective web application that could handle a high volume of users hitting the platform concurrently. The platform has proven its effectiveness by processing 3 million dollars’ worth of sales in one weekend.
The PolarSeven and Readings’ team have also transformed CX creating a fast, responsive and reliable website and app that is truly setting the benchmark for the cinema industry.
“Ten servers running 24/7 means you are paying for that capacity 24/7 whether or not it is used, in comparison to a system that can scale automatically based on user demand. Though there is more cost in setting up this kind of environment, the cost savings from efficiency and CX make it worthwhile. The capacity is infinitely scalable, and my best guess (re server capacity) is taken out of it”
– KEVIN RISPIN, READING CINEMAS HEAD OF IT
Exceptional outcomes for a competitive edge
This partnership has helped Reading Cinemas achieve the following:
- Stable customer experience even in peak times
- Removed the guesswork from running servers
- Serverless app requiring bare minimum of maintenance/patching
- Fully scalable to meet the demands of a fluctuating environment
- No downtime
- A system that can cope with promotional events (e.g., $5 tickets for National Cinema Day – 80,000 tickets sold with no issues)
Growth into the future and an exceptional customer experience
Over the past 3 years since implementation, downtime has been eliminated while providing the scope and scalability needed to cope with the massive fluctuations of the cinema industry.
Reading Cinemas have used the new infrastructure to supports an aggressive food and beverage promotional tactic integrated with SMS. They have also eliminated complaints and ensured their website and app are the best in the business. Their environment now easily supports the 70% of tickets that are sold online, strengthening their commitment to provide the best value and best CX in the country.
