Village Cinemas has rolled out Australia's first mobile movie ticketing system. The mobile-optimised website allows customers to purchase and redeem movie tickets using their smartphone.
CEO of Village, Kirk Edwards, said the nationwide cinema company aimed to attract users of a variety of mobile operating systems, complementing its existing iPad and iPhone apps.
“We were offered an opportunity to do an iPhone and iPad app about a year go,” Edwards said. “When we looked at where our bookings were coming from, one fifth were from Android and other smartphones, so we wanted a system that would cater for all people with smartphones.”
Edwards said the system is the next step up from online bookings because of its environmentally friendly nature.
"We’re conscious about the amount of paper we use and we’ve now gone to a barcode format.”
The site is not the only form of online media used by Village, with Edwards saying that social media is used to communicate with its patrons.
“Facebook is a huge way for us to communicate with our audience,” he said.
“We’ve been emboldened by Foursquare and we know that when we put an offer on Facebook a few weeks ago for free tickets to a showing, in four minutes we got rid of 400 tickets.”
The next step for Edwards is the development of another mobile app to compliment Village’s ticketing system, as well as making all Village Cinemas digital.
“We’re in the process of going digital right across Australia, and we should have every cinema digitised by June 2012,” he said. “That in itself is a huge step forward for us in terms of what we can and can’t show.”
Follow Lisa Banks on Twitter: @CapricaStar
Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAu