The Company
Village Roadshow is Australia's leading entertainment company operating theme parks, cinemas, film and DVD distribution and marketing solutions.
Operating 577 screens in 57 cinemas across Australia, and the famous theme parks on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the Village Roadshow brand provides entertainment to thousands of Australian’s on a daily basis.
In addition to providing entertainment, Village Roadshow invests heavily in programs to help preserve the environment and wildlife and contributes to the Australian film economy by producing and distributing films locally.
We spoke to Arul Arogyanathan, Group General Manager – IT at Village Roadshow on how they were able to provide great customer experiences during the blockbuster release of Spiderman – No Way Home.
The Challenge
“Village Roadshow strives to offer an end-to-end frictionless customer journey in every aspect across the business. In the past, the announcement of a major blockbuster movie would drive significant online traffic, particularly around ticket purchasing, causing the website to crash and frustrating customers.” said Arul.
“Our on-premises infrastructure made scaling and innovating to meet demand difficult, affecting our customer service. We recognised that to be truly customer-centric and deliver frictionless and seamless entertainment options for our customers, we needed to pivot to a technology platform that could meet our business needs.”
The need for a flexible and agile platform to run their website that would allow them to rapidly scale on-demand during the peaks that came with announcements of new releases in cinemas, particularly during the Christmas holidays and the Boxing Day movie releases was imperative.
The Solution
Once Village Roadshow migrated to AWS, AC3 conducted a Well Architected Review on the Village Roadshow architecture, developed a roadmap with the Village Roadshow IT team, and re-architected their environment to ensure it was operating in accordance with best practices.
This review covered the five pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimisation, ensuring Village Roadshow’s architecture was stable and efficient during the highest highs, and the lowest lows of website traffic.
“AC3 also played an instrumental role in our control tower management and configuration which included automating setup of the landing zone and account provisioning, applying guardrails for on-going governance, and delivering monitoring dashboards that provide insight into organisational units, accounts, governance, compliance, health of the system and workload thresholds.” Arul added.
The Results
The results have been outstanding for Village Roadshow. In 2018, the blockbuster release of Avengers: Infinity Wars put the Village Roadshow environment to the test followed by Avengers: End Game in 2019, which drew 1.2 million visitors to the ticketing website on the first day. Village Roadshow was one of the only global distributors of Marvel films not to experience any traffic issues for customers wanting to book sessions and purchase tickets.
The big, and surprise test, was in November 2021 when Spider-Man: No Way Home had ticket-selling websites crashing minutes after tickets were first posted, with some websites introducing ticket queues.
“With 10 x increase, equating to a 1000% increase, in website traffic in one hour, our environment auto-scaled and added the necessary resources to handle the very sudden, massive spike in website traffic, allowing customers to purchase tickets with ease.”
“Spiderman shot straight into the top three pre-releases of all time, taking more advanced bookings in one day than James Bond did, delivering our second biggest box-office sell ever.”
“It was only possible thanks to re-architecting our environment undertaken by our IT team and the AC3 team.” Concluded Arul.