Movie Analytics for Real-Time Operational Efficiency

Key objectives

  • Optimize operational efficiency
  • Fill up as many theater seats as possible
  • Predict movie performances

 

Key results

  • 300 daily users
  • 90 theatres and 720 screens monitored
  • Real-time and historical analytics
  • Integration with Microsoft SharePoint ®
  • Integration with existing Data Warehouse
  • Real-time app available on smartphones and tablets

 

  • Movie Analytics for Real-Time Operational Efficiency

How a leading movie theater chain is fighting the rise of on-demand streaming services with real-time operational efficiency

Context

Like its parent company, Pathé Gaumont is very innovative, and is keen on modernizing its theaters and using technology to improve its operational efficiency and offer its customers an exceptional movie watching experience. They’re continuously upgrading and modernizing their theaters across Europe.  For example, they hired renowned designer Ora Ïto to completely restyle their ten-screen cinema complex in Paris-Beaugrenelle. Pathé Gaumont introduced Dolby Atmos and IMAX in their theaters, and recently opened 4DX cinemas across Europe. Today, Pathé Gaumont is using real-time analytics to attract more moviegoers, change the way they do business, increase their competitive edge, and obtain real-time operational efficiency to fight the rise in popularity of on-demand streaming services.

Challenge

To build their real-time operational efficiency solution, Pathé Gaumont needed to ingest sales information from their theater ticket system, their online booking system, their concession stand system, and correlate the data with their multiplex scheduling system, the social media sites and the detailed logs of the digital projectors for each screen. These logs contain complete projected media sequence information, including advertisements and trailers, down to the milliseconds. This information needed to be gathered for each theater and screen and presented through meaningful dashboards to top management and local sales and marketing users, in real-time. Pathé Gaumont also needed to incorporate several broadcasting, media and entertainment rules specific to the French movie industry - such as, movie-weeks start on Wednesdays and end on Tuesdays, and show times after Tuesday midnight are counted as Tuesday, not Wednesday show times. Pathé Gaumont wanted to monitor their movie activity from anywhere and at anytime, and wanted the user experience to be end-user device specific. They wanted the solution to be as easy and intuitive to use as stock market investment app. They also wanted the solution to be collaborative and allow their users to access and share KPIs with each other. They wanted a cost-effectively solution that was easy and quick to build, and that would allow them to start small and grow over time. They zeroed-in on cloud-based technology to give them the high-reliability, redundancy and security they needed to dependably run peak-time transactions - minutes before each screening without glitches.

Solution

Pathé Gaumont didn’t have the specialized knowledge required to build such a solution in-house, and didn’t want to amass a team of experts to develop it. They decided to use the ForePaas Platform to build their solution. The ForePaaS Platform pre-built data connectors quickly allowed Pathé Gaumont to easily access their different data sources. With the ForePaaS point-and-click interface, Pathé Gaumont effortlessly created the movie industry business rules they needed to prepare the data for analysis, and build the powerful analytic dashboards, KPIs and data visualization graphs the management team was looking for.

 

They now can access important KPIs in near-real-time, several times a day and quickly reach real-time operational efficiency. These include movie performances at the country level, per region, per city, per theater, per screen and per show time. They can run sophisticated analytics and compare for example, theater tickets sales with online and kiosks sales, per movie, per region, per day. They’re analyzing different ticket prices per movie formats (including IMAX, 3D, French, English versions), per time of day and per customer segment and comparing these with a variety of average ticket prices. Pathé Gaumont is gathering 6-8 GB of data per day. The solution monitors 43 workflows and 214 different actions, and processes on average 200 jobs per week. Pathé Gaumont is using this information to bring more viewers into their theaters and to optimize theater bookings.

 

More than 300 daily users, from the individual theater level all the way to the top management in headquarters, leverage these dashboards. Users access the data in near-real-time from any device - mobile, tablet or desktop. Different interfaces were created for each device type. The ForePass KPIs were easily integrated with the Microsoft SharePoint ® [Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/sharepoint/collaboration] web-based collaborative platform Pathé Gaumont was already using, so end-users could effortlessly collaborate with each other. Pathé Gaumont’s existing Data Warehouse was also effortlessly integrated into the ForePass AI Platform. Historical box office data from the Data Warehouse is now combined with real-time sales data, giving end-users the quantitative historical data necessary to predict audience interest in particular movies. Pathé Gaumont decided to combine their two separate ticket and concessions sales systems into one. ForePaas allowed them to easily integrate a new ticket and concession cinema management software suite without disrupting their daily real-time analytics.

 

All three systems were run in parallel as Pathé Gaumont was deploying this new system across their French circuit. Pathé Gaumont can now easily compare the profitability of different concession items per theater with seat bookings. The new system also gives them the information they need to optimize their staff schedules and achieve real-time operational efficiency. In the future Pathé Gaumont is looking at better ways to leverage this wealth of information, to develop more customer loyalty programs. They’re also looking at adding movie trailer and advertisement performance analysis to the ForePaas AI Platform, and possibly share this information with film distributors. The goal is to optimize trailer performance and recommend to distributors the best mix (where and when to show a trailer; in which theaters, before which movie, and which trailer version – short or long), in which order (from the first trailer shown -lights on, partial attendance- to the last one -lights off, full attendance, just before the movie begins).

Product

Real-Time Operational Efficiency Dashboard

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