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Entertainment Ireland, the Irish events guide and listings Web site has launched what it says is Ireland's first multi-theatre, on-line cinema booking service.
The new application, which will let users buy cinema tickets over the Internet, is the latest addition to the company's range of services. "It was the one thing that everybody was asking for," said Julian Douglas managing director of Entertainment Ireland. Douglas explained Ireland has one of the highest cinema going populations in Europe and the new application should prove popular as more theatres sign up to it.
Currently only four movie theatres are using the technology, including the Ormonde in Stillorgan, Dublin and the Gate Multiplex, the Reel Picture and Cinema World, all in Cork. Douglas said that the company had been looking into launching this kind of service for some time, but it did not have the resources to undertake such a task on its own.
The Ormonde has actually been using the service, which was developed by Irish mobile services company, Itsmobile for a year. But Kieran McCrea, sales director at Itsmobile, said that the other three theatres have not had their own on-line, Web-based booking service until now. And although take-up seems to be slow, McCrea added that with the involvement of Entertainment Ireland, he expects the service to take off. "It's a great boost to have Entertainment Ireland promoting the service and can only lead to more tickets being sold and a happier cinema-going public in this country," he said.
McCrea explained to ElectricNews.Net that cinema booking systems are designed to be used as standalone products. In order to launch the service for Entertainment Ireland, Itsmobile had to set up a network that would give it access to the cinema booking software and that the cinemas themselves would now have to keep their networks running for 24 hours a day instead of switching them off each night.
Itsmobile's technology accesses the booking software in a cinema, connects it to the Internet and makes it available to users. Moreover the company has developed technology that will allow Eircell Vodafone customers to use the service through Internet enabled phones and charge theatre tickets to their phone bills. McCrea said the company is negotiating with other wireless carriers for similar deals.
"We've been educating the cinemas in Ireland and the UK, and everybody is interested. We think they are just sitting back and waiting to see if it will be successful." McCrea said.
Earlier this year Entertainment Ireland launched an SMS service that reminds users when an event was about to happen. That service, which Douglas said has been very successful, along with the new cinema booking facility cap a series of increasingly successful years for the company.
Entertainment Ireland was founded in 1997. "We started from nothing, but now we get 1.3 million page impression per month and 170,000 sessions per month," Douglas claimed. He said these figures, which represent a growth of around 33 percent in the last two years have put the company on par with other highly popular Internet sites in Ireland such as Ireland.com, Eircom.net, On-line.ie and others.
According to Douglas, the company success is based on a number of factors. It does not depend entirely on advertising revenues for its income, it has continued to maintain a full time sales staff and has focused on sales since its inception. The company has also tried to develop more slowly, "like a traditional media company, such a magazine," Douglas said.
The company is currently at breakeven status and has a turnover of about IEP300,000 per year. Douglas said he expects the firm to reach profitability when advertising in the sector picks up in 2002.
Entertainment Ireland employs seven in Dublin and can be found at http://www.entertainment.ie.
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