Wells Film Centre

17 March 2006

Location: South West England

Derek Cooper, of Wells Film Centre in Somerset, runs a small independent cinema.  In the last ten years ninety-six multiplex screens have opened up within a forty minute drive from his cinema.  His response was to build an e-commerce website to make it as easy as possible for his customers to book tickets online  He has now invested in integrating his box office sales with his website sales with great success.

Transcript of Video

My love of films started when I was living at home as a young child and I used to show my parents films from my bedroom.  I had a projector in my bedroom, and they allowed me to cut a hole in the wall so I had my own first porthole, and in our 20ft lounge I used to show them 8mm films and then 16mm films.  And then it grew when I went to St Dunstans School at Glastonbury, and I started a film society, and from there, the rest is history.

I set up the Wells Films centre back in November 1992, and if you remember the late 80s, early 90s the industry was in a revival mode.  We had the first multiplex at The Point, in Milton Keynes, and the only way that we could compete if you like, and stay in business, was to provide modern, luxury surroundings, seven days a week, and a choice of movies. 

The competitive pressures that I’ve been under as an independent cinema in the last few years have been enormous, not least of all since the day we opened here some twelve years ago, we’ve seen ninety plus multiplex screens open, all of them 45 minutes from this door, and we’ve had to look at many ways we can compete with that.  Not least of course getting the product as well for a small independent, but somewhere along the lines we have succeeded. 

The key to my success as an independent cinema would be amongst many things without question is the fact that we are now have a fully integrated, online booking system, we have the internet and broadband, and this means we can offer in fact a cinema that is open 24/7.

I decided to invest in a website first of all to obviously bring us online with the major boys, who were at that time providing these sorts of facilities.  The cost was somewhere in the region of £2000, and I would say hand on heart that it’s difficult to quantify, but we’ve probably pulled that back already.  We don’t have staff sitting around at night answering phones, and in this modern world of ours, people can access us even at 3 o’clock in the morning if they want. 

Broadband is certainly encouraging more of our customers to go online and book tickets, in fact it’s quite amazing that it’s not just the young people, we found much of our middle aged to elderly people utilise the online booking system.  What I think they like about it is that they don’t have to speak to anybody, they can do it in there own time, they get written confirmation of what they’ve done, and I think they feel extremely happy with it. 

Over the next few months we will be one of the cinemas who hopefully will be granted one of these £3K digital projectors.  This will instantly mean we’ll have much better access to some of the more specialised movies, which is a very big market for us.  This will be a system that will probably develop quite quickly into a system where the film, instead of the old way, tins and labour intensive hardware in the projection room that most people have no idea what you do, I can see the day coming when the signal will arrive by satellite, straight into a server, into the projection room, and onto the screen.  And the quality will be every bit as good as we’re used to, in fact it will be better. 

I see the future of Wells films being a very exciting place to be, the last 42 years that I’ve been in the industry, it’s been very labour intensive, and very heavy, hard work, reels of film.  The future is full of technology, broadband, satellite, and the girls, as they take the business over, are going to see in the next few years more developments than I’ve seen in my entire lifetime in this industry.  http://www.wellsfilmcentre.co.uk