Vista alternatives: keep the back office, replace what moviegoers see

Vista Group was founded in New Zealand in 1996, is listed on the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges, and reports Vista installed in more than 80 countries. Its cinema offer runs from head office to point of sale: film scheduling, circuit management, reporting, POS, ticket and F&B kiosks, dine-in, and on the moviegoer side websites and apps, loyalty and subscriptions, the Lumos sales channels for web, mobile and kiosk, and Movio EQ for campaign management.

That is the broadest suite in exhibition, and for the back office there is rarely a good reason to leave it. When a cinema goes looking for a Vista alternative, the complaint is almost never settlement or scheduling. It is what the audience sees, what it costs to change, and how long a change takes. In a suite that covers everything, the website and the app are one product line among many. At Filmgrail they are the whole product, and that is the argument of this page.

Risk. A back-office migration touches staff training, historical data, film hire settlement, distributor reporting and the daily cash process at every site, and every failure is visible at the counter. Replacing the front end touches none of it. Filmgrail reads programme, sessions, seat maps and prices from Vista and writes the completed sale back, so Vista stays the single record for reporting. The Vista integration page shows exactly what moves between the two, and Filmgrail vs Vista sets out where the line falls.

Speed. You can put a new site and checkout in front of real audiences, and read real conversion numbers, in the time a migration would spend in discovery.

Results. What changes is everything your audience sees: film pages with trailers and context that can rank for a film in your town, a native app that sends a push when a saved film goes on sale, a checkout built and measured on completion, and loyalty and profiles that tell you who your moviegoers are before they buy. Across cinemas on Filmgrail, nine in ten end users create a profile, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%. The same layer runs on Veezi, POSitive, RTS, Omniterm and other box office systems, so a later back-office change does not mean rebuilding your site and apps.

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

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 Vista, 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.