The problem
Some dates can’t move. The biggest film of the year opens on Thursday. The telethon goes live at seven. Tickets for the festival gala go on sale at ten. On those days demand isn’t a curve, it’s a wall: everyone arrives in the same few minutes, and most of what you’ll sell all year depends on them.
Most platforms are built for an average day. On the peak, they slow down, double-book seats or drop payments, and those customers don’t come back later. A charity on a telethon night gets only one chance to get it right.
Where we learned it
Can Factory’s first client, in 2002, was Comic Relief, and our team had worked with the charity since 1999. Live telethons are the hardest traffic there is: an on-air call to action sends hundreds of thousands of people to donate at once.
- Red Nose Day 2005: over 25,000 donations in less than fifteen minutes.
- Almost £40M secured on the platform in a single Red Nose Day night (a record £37,808,564), with 1,500 concurrent donation transactions.
- Sport Relief: the first UK online donations event run alongside a television programme, taking donations from the web and from interactive TV.
- Live 8 (2005): we built the petition platform from the Red Nose Day 2005 platform, with Akamai capturing sign-ups at the edge and passing them to our application.
- The Oracle Partner Network Innovation Award for the Comic Relief platform.
Cineworld and VOX: blockbuster launches
We ran Cineworld’s online booking for over eight years, and have run VOX’s since 2015, through every major release.
- Cineworld: 1M+ tickets in a single weekend, with no interruption and no double-bookings, and load tested to serve over 500,000 visitors a day. Online sales grew from 13% to over 40% within 24 months and 90%+ within 36 months.
- VOX Cinemas: a platform that grew with VOX from 150 to 600+ screens across eight countries, with 99.9% uptime at the region’s biggest launches, including the opening of cinemas in Saudi Arabia.
- Red Sea International Film Festival: stable through gala ticket releases and live award announcements, for 30,000+ filmgoers and 3,100+ industry professionals.
How we do it
The same five steps, whether it’s a film, a telethon or a festival.
1. Model the peak
We start from the busiest minute, not the busiest day: how many people, doing what, through which systems. Then we load test beyond it, with partners such as thinkTRIBE, and keep testing as the business grows.
2. Decouple and queue
The slowest system sets the pace, so we keep it out of the customer’s way. For Comic Relief, banking APIs took between 0.5 and 10 seconds per transaction. An asynchronous queue captured each donation instantly and passed it to the banks over 150 concurrent connections, so nothing was dropped. For cinemas, a middleware layer in front of the ticketing system handles the surge, so every system does what it does best.
3. Keep every seat honest
Seat availability is updated in under a second, so two people never buy the same seat, even on a 1M-ticket weekend.
4. Protect the payment
Payment is the step most likely to fail at peak. We use more than one provider where we can, with automatic fail-over, and keep the payment journey isolated from everything else. See Payments.
5. Run it, then improve it
We monitor through the launch with the client’s team, and every peak teaches something for the next one. Cloud platforms scale out automatically and back in afterwards. See DevOps & Cloud Engineering.
Beyond cinema
The same thinking applies to any immovable date: ticket on-sales for concerts and sport, festivals, product drops, Black Friday and Christmas trading, charity appeals and live TV votes. Our team’s background includes retail peaks such as Valentine’s Day for Interflora, and at ITV we built the User Data Store to run alongside a site with more than 8 million unique visitors a month, with no impact on its performance.
Related
- Services: DevOps & Cloud Engineering, Software Development, Vista Cinema Integrators
- Solutions: Payments, Replatforming and legacy migration
- Case studies: Comic Relief, Sport Relief, Live 8, Cineworld, VOX Cinemas, Red Sea International Film Festival
- Specialist site: Can Factory Live Events
Frequently asked questions
How do you know the platform will cope on the day?
We load test beyond the forecast peak before launch, using the busiest minute rather than the daily total, and test again as the business grows. Cineworld’s platform was load tested to serve over 500,000 visitors a day.
Do we have to replace our ticketing system to cope with launch day?
Usually not. A middleware and caching layer in front of it handles the surge and only asks the ticketing system for what it needs. That’s how Cineworld and VOX have run blockbuster launches on Vista.
Can you help before a launch if you didn’t build the platform?
Yes. We can review the architecture, load test it and fix the weak points before the date.
