When you’re a cinema technology company, helping customers deliver the best movie experiences is core to your business. That means giving them insights they can act on, fast. Vista Group is going cloud-first with one of New Zealand’s biggest Microsoft Azure cloud consumption agreements, to help cinema operators make the most of their data. It’s also seizing the opportunities of generative AI to take business intelligence to the next level. A personalised daily podcast integrated into its Oneview app means cinema leaders can now listen to the performance info they need to set their day’s agenda as they get ready and head to work.
Sitting at the intersection of entertainment and retail, there are few businesses with as many moving parts as cinema exhibition: new movies every week, sophisticated food and beverage operations, complex technology, a large and youthful frontline staff base, and guests expecting the best experience for their time and money. It takes a lot to stay on top and every decision counts.
Vista Group, the world leader in technology for the global film industry, created the Oneview app to help cinema CEOs and their senior leaders for that very reason. Launched in 2023, Oneview brings together theatre, movie and moviegoer data from a suite of the Group’s solutions: Vista, Numero and Movio.
Hosted and processed in Microsoft Azure, information on box office revenue, admissions, food and beverage spend, ticket pricing, operational KPIs, staff performance and more is turned into real-time insights that can be actioned at the touch of a button.
As Matthew Liebmann, Chief Product, Innovation & Marketing Officer at Vista Group, puts it:
“Oneview marked the first time Vista united data in this way for our clients. The way we present the data in the app tells the story of their business, right down to the individual theatre and showtime level, and in the context of the overall market. In one place a user can see how much they’ve earned from a particular movie, whether they’re achieving their expected market share, how many upcoming showtimes are at risk of selling out, and which loyalty members should watch that movie based on their prior habits.”
But when you’re in the cinema business, you know compelling content isn’t all about what’s on screen.
“We want our app to be the first thing executives open each morning. Most people I know start their days getting ready, wolfing down breakfast and commuting to work – reading and deep analysis are rarely an option,” Matthew adds.
With this in mind, Vista Group was keen to explore whether it could break new ground with the way it delivered insights, by using cutting edge technology in a way that made a practical difference to users on a daily basis.
Transforming business intelligence for busy cinema leaders
In June 2024, Vista Group signed a landmark cloud services agreement with Microsoft to enable greater scale and innovation than ever before, taking their existing AI collaboration to a whole new level. Vista Group was part of a small but select number of forward-thinking enterprises who joined the Microsoft Technology Center AI First Movers programme in mid-2023. Being part of the programme gave Vista Group access to support from a crack team who specialise in assisting clients and partners with innovative ideas using AI.
A lot of what they called Star Trek-style ideas were batted around, but Vista Group had a clear vision. Was it possible to transform the data tables and charts presented in Oneview into an audio “briefing” for cinema leaders to listen to while preparing for work or on their morning commutes?
No one had ever heard an idea like it before.
“Vista Group is ahead of the curve. They’re using leading-edge tools like agents, which have really only been around as a concept for less than a year. Agents are essentially AIs coming together to talk to each other like a virtual team, each one an expert in a certain field, to agree on which are the most important insights or actions on a given topic,” says Daniel Scott-Raynsford, Partner Technology Strategist at Microsoft New Zealand.
Oneview uses traditional AI to extract the relevant nuggets of information from within mountains of data. Together the teams added the GPT-4 generative large language model provided via the Azure OpenAI Service, including building Azure Text to Speech technology into the platform. That allowed it to convert the data into an audio version, with generative AI identifying and reporting just the essential topics a cinema leader needs to know for the day ahead.
From visual platform to audio helper
The result has completely reimagined the traditional visual platform for today’s world.
Now, while CEOs are on the move in the morning, they can listen to a two-minute podcast-style digest with everything from overnight box office, admissions and market share, showtimes at risk of selling out, food and beverage performance, and pre-sales for movies about to hit screens. There are also transcripts of the podcast, for both convenience and accessibility.
As Matthew says: “This is business-oriented AI that seeks to be of everyday use by being real-time, future-focussed, and decision-oriented. It can have a material impact on your day and your organisation’s performance.”
The podcast feature will be available to all Vista Group’s Oneview clients. With a truly global client base comprising many of the world’s largest and most sophisticated cinema exhibitors, Matthew is excited to show off the new tool’s other features, including its ability to speak in multiple languages.
“There’s a lot of leading-edge stuff behind the scenes,” Daniel says proudly. “This just makes it look easy.”
”This is the start of something really big”
Vista has big plans to continue evolving its Oneview platform and insights, with greater personalisations on the way. Its cloud agreement with Microsoft will allow it to leverage Azure AI at even greater scale, enabling new “First Draft” features that automatically populate emails with recommended text, adopting the unique voice of the customer’s brand.
There will also be more interactive fan experiences, using photobooths powered with generative AI to enable fans to craft their own original content, casting themselves in their favourite films with unique, sharable images.
“When we launched Oneview, the intention was to reveal how you’re performing, why, and recommend what
you should do to seize every opportunity. And generative AI takes that to the next level, in the most accessible way possible,” says Matthew.
Daniel sees the innovation breaking the fourth wall, landing an even bigger audience outside the cinema.
“In the future, we think every business with the level of data Vista Group holds will adopt this model for their own clients. This is the start of something really big.”