TicketCo alternatives: a platform built for film festivals

TicketCo is a Norwegian ticketing company founded in Bergen in 2012 by two event organisers, and its public marketplace, ticketco.events, lists everything from concerts and museum entry to football, with country sites for Norway, the UK, Sweden, Ireland, Poland and Slovakia. Its product line runs from Flow and Flex for online sales to Admin, Direct, Connect and a scanning app. Today TicketCo describes itself as a ticketing system for sport and club operations, and its own history says it set out to become the best ticketing solution for football. Tromsø International Film Festival sells all of its screenings and its ticket cards through TicketCo.

That focus is TicketCo's strength and a festival's reason to look further. A film festival is not a matchday: it has sections and strands, films that screen once, passes bought months before the programme exists, and an industry programme that must stay off public sale. Festivals look for a TicketCo alternative when they want a platform whose roadmap is built around those problems, with the festival website and app in the same product.

A general ticketing system sells a known event to a buyer. A festival sells a programme. Films belong to several sections at once, a pass or ticket card is bought in the autumn and redeemed in January against screenings that were not announced when it was sold, and the hour the programme drops carries a large share of the year's sales. None of that is exotic, but it is where general-purpose systems ask the festival to work around them.

On Filmgrail those are the product. The programme lives on your festival website, in your CMS, with film pages structured for search and sessions bookable from the same page. Passes redeem against individual screenings. Industry and press screenings sit beside the public programme without appearing on public sale. And the edition rolls forward to next year as content.

See the wider market in 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.

In northern Norway, Aurora Kino runs its website, apps and online ticketing on Filmgrail.

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.