Shift72 alternatives: when the in-person edition is the festival

Shift72, made in New Zealand, describes itself as a secure video-on-demand platform. For festivals it offers film rentals and sales, bundles, festival passes, pre-sales, sales limits and watch windows, with studio-grade encryption, geoblocking, multi-currency ecommerce and native apps. Its festival page shows Festival de Cannes, SXSW, the New York Film Festival, TIFF and the Melbourne International Film Festival among its clients, and it does not publish prices.

That is serious streaming infrastructure, and for an online edition with rights holders to satisfy it is built for the job. Festivals look for a Shift72 alternative when the online edition has shrunk back to a sidebar and the in-person edition is the festival again. What they need then is a festival website, a programme organised by section, an app for the week, passes redeemed at the door and a checkout that sells seats in a venue. That is a different product.

A streaming platform organises a festival around titles and viewing windows. A public edition in cinemas is organised around sections, venues, times and seats: a film that plays once, in a hall you borrowed for ten days, to an audience that bought a pass months earlier and now wants the best seat still left. Those are different content models and different commerce models, and a festival website built for one rarely serves the other well.

Filmgrail is built for the in-person edition. Sections and strands are first-class content, passes are sold before the programme exists and redeemed later, industry screenings stay off public sale while accredited guests can book them, and the site is built to stay up the hour the programme drops. Your audience gets one branded site and app for the whole week.

If a small online sidebar remains, keep a streaming platform for it and link it from your Filmgrail site. For the wider market, see film festival ticketing platforms compared.

Festivals already running their public edition on Filmgrail include the Bergen International Film Festival, Norway's largest film festival with over 120 documentary and fiction films a year, and the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund, which runs a public programme and the New Nordic Films industry market in the same week from one system. Haugesund's main venue, Edda Kino, runs on the same platform all year, so the festival and the cinema share one infrastructure.

Because the public edition is where a festival earns its audience, and it deserves a website and app that are unmistakably yours: sections and strands as first-class content, passes sold before the programme exists and redeemed later, industry accreditation beside public sale, and a site built to stay up the hour the programme drops. The edition rolls forward every year as content, not as a new build.

A mid-size international festival pays about $5,000 a year, flat, with no per-ticket fees, and smaller festivals pay less (see pricing). If we already integrate your ticketing and payment provider you can be live in a few weeks; a provider we have not connected before takes about a month.

See it before you talk to anyone: build your festival's prototype in 30 seconds — your own festival site and festival back office, from your current address. Then book a festival demo against your real programme, and read how the festival platform works.