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Summer Blockbusters: Moviegoers Demand Zero Downtime

Michelle McLean

More than half of Americans (57 percent) plan to buy movie tickets using websites or apps to avoid waiting in line at the theatre, according to ScaleArc's Summer Blockbuster Survey. The study, which examined Americans’ attitudes and behavior when it comes to purchasing movie tickets this summer, found that 62 percent of Americans said they would be upset if they were purchasing movie tickets and the site or app went down, and 90 percent agreed that movie ticketing websites and apps should have no downtime this summer.

As Americans head to the theatres this summer, sites and apps selling tickets to the hottest releases of the season must be ready to handle the huge demand that comes with it, or they risk losing customers and revenue. Our study confirmed that Americans demand movie ticketing websites and apps that are never down and always fast – especially during the peak summer blockbuster season – and many Americans won’t hesitate to move on to a competitor website or app if they aren’t satisfied with their performance.

Americans Hate to Wait

According to the survey, Americans’ #1 reason for buying movie tickets using websites or apps is that they hate waiting in line (57 percent). They also purchase tickets using websites or apps because they like knowing they have tickets to a film at their preferred screening time (47 percent) and like being able to pick out seats in advance (38 percent).

More than half (62 percent) of Americans would be disgruntled if they were purchasing movie tickets and the website or app went down, and nearly all (90 percent) agreed that movie ticketing websites and apps should have zero downtime this summer.

The study revealed that 39 percent of Americans who encounter problems while trying to purchase movie tickets using websites or apps will be quick to move on to a competitor. Members of the tech community were particularly intolerant of digital performance issues – 45 percent said they would visit a competitor site or app if a movie reservation system was experiencing downtime.

Other top responses to encountering downtime on a movie ticketing website/app included:

■ Be forced to wait in line: 44 percent

■ Choose a different theatre: 36 percent

■ Never again choose the reservation site: 23 percent

Top Movies Driving Online Ticket Sales

In spite of viral hype, Americans won’t be rushing out to see Ghostbusters this summer. Instead, when asked which movies they’ll be going online to purchase tickets, Americans first said Finding Dory and then Star Trek.

Top five movies Americans are excited to see this summer:

Finding Dory: 42 percent

Star Trek: 33 percent

Jason Bourne 4: 32 percent

Suicide Squad: 29 percent

Independence Day 2: 24 percent

Independence Day 2 moved up the list considerably among Americans working in tech, who picked it as their first choice (43 percent) followed by Star Trek (38 percent).

With a vote of 8 percent each, the fewest Americans are excited to see The Conjuring 2 and Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

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Summer Blockbusters: Moviegoers Demand Zero Downtime

Michelle McLean

More than half of Americans (57 percent) plan to buy movie tickets using websites or apps to avoid waiting in line at the theatre, according to ScaleArc's Summer Blockbuster Survey. The study, which examined Americans’ attitudes and behavior when it comes to purchasing movie tickets this summer, found that 62 percent of Americans said they would be upset if they were purchasing movie tickets and the site or app went down, and 90 percent agreed that movie ticketing websites and apps should have no downtime this summer.

As Americans head to the theatres this summer, sites and apps selling tickets to the hottest releases of the season must be ready to handle the huge demand that comes with it, or they risk losing customers and revenue. Our study confirmed that Americans demand movie ticketing websites and apps that are never down and always fast – especially during the peak summer blockbuster season – and many Americans won’t hesitate to move on to a competitor website or app if they aren’t satisfied with their performance.

Americans Hate to Wait

According to the survey, Americans’ #1 reason for buying movie tickets using websites or apps is that they hate waiting in line (57 percent). They also purchase tickets using websites or apps because they like knowing they have tickets to a film at their preferred screening time (47 percent) and like being able to pick out seats in advance (38 percent).

More than half (62 percent) of Americans would be disgruntled if they were purchasing movie tickets and the website or app went down, and nearly all (90 percent) agreed that movie ticketing websites and apps should have zero downtime this summer.

The study revealed that 39 percent of Americans who encounter problems while trying to purchase movie tickets using websites or apps will be quick to move on to a competitor. Members of the tech community were particularly intolerant of digital performance issues – 45 percent said they would visit a competitor site or app if a movie reservation system was experiencing downtime.

Other top responses to encountering downtime on a movie ticketing website/app included:

■ Be forced to wait in line: 44 percent

■ Choose a different theatre: 36 percent

■ Never again choose the reservation site: 23 percent

Top Movies Driving Online Ticket Sales

In spite of viral hype, Americans won’t be rushing out to see Ghostbusters this summer. Instead, when asked which movies they’ll be going online to purchase tickets, Americans first said Finding Dory and then Star Trek.

Top five movies Americans are excited to see this summer:

Finding Dory: 42 percent

Star Trek: 33 percent

Jason Bourne 4: 32 percent

Suicide Squad: 29 percent

Independence Day 2: 24 percent

Independence Day 2 moved up the list considerably among Americans working in tech, who picked it as their first choice (43 percent) followed by Star Trek (38 percent).

With a vote of 8 percent each, the fewest Americans are excited to see The Conjuring 2 and Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...