RTS alternatives: a dedicated front end on top of your RTS POS

RTS (Ready Theater Systems) is a cinema point-of-sale and management system from Knoxville, Tennessee, founded in the early 1990s by a theatre operator. It cites more than 900 cinemas and over a billion tickets sold, and serves independents, chains, drive-ins, family entertainment centres and live venues. Its package includes POS, reserved seating, online ticketing, websites, a branded customer app, loyalty and memberships, kiosks, digital signage and 24/7/365 support. RTS publishes its pricing: a base licence of $2,140 including one station, $440 for each additional selling station, billed annually with no contracts, and no share of online ticket fees.

That is a well-run POS with transparent pricing, and there is rarely a reason to leave it. What cinemas usually want more of is the part the audience sees. RTS builds its website and app as part of a POS package. Filmgrail builds nothing else.

Film pages with trailers, context and structured data that can rank for a film in your town. An editorial CMS your team can use without a developer. Native iOS and Android apps that share the website's content, loyalty and customer record, with push when a saved film goes on sale. A checkout measured on completion rate, and audience analytics that tell you who your moviegoers are. That is the whole of Filmgrail, and it shows. Across cinemas on Filmgrail, nine in ten end users create a profile, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%.

RTS stays exactly where it is. Filmgrail reads programme, sessions, seating and pricing from RTS and writes each completed sale back, so your reporting stays whole. The RTS integration page shows exactly what moves between the two.

Because the online sale is now the biggest box office most cinemas have, and it deserves a product built for nothing else. Filmgrail runs Classic Cinemas in the Chicago area, Wallis Cinemas in South Australia, Ster-Kinekor and cinemas across Norway.

Pricing is published and scales by screens: from $200 a year for a single screen to $20,000 a year for a large circuit, flat per screen with no per-ticket fees (see pricing). Because we already integrate with RTS, you can be live in a few weeks.

See it before you talk to anyone: the cinema website prototype tool builds a version of your own site from its current URL. Then book a demo against your real programme.