Well that was fun. CBS Weekend News just spotlighted Phoenix, Oregon and our promotion with the Oregon Hospitality Foundation in support of Oregon restaurants!
I’d forgotten what it felt like to get a big rush of sales and to manage support requests like in the first few weeks of release when I was on the computer every hour.
It brought up both happiness for getting the film into the world and also stress in making sure everyone was having a good viewing experience. Overall it went well, but if we scale past around 1,500 in a short period of time, we won’t be able to support it ourselves.
That’s not good enough. I know I’ve been talking about this for a few weeks. But the next level up is expensive, and the team has to decide (and know for sure) if we will have another national push for sales. Especially now that we are transitioning to digital, it is unclear if the extra cost makes sense. There is the possibility it makes more sense now than ever — if the digital push also brings bigger national partners.
I will again research the video component of the system this week to see if it can be upgraded easily. The rest of the platform is ok for now. A different video player “might” (or might not) clear up a few issues for people. But the main problem isn’t our software. It’s that people are used to watching films on their current platforms and rarely stray. When they do, it can quickly become confusing. We’ve worked hard to streamline everything so that it is simple and clear, but sometimes a customer’s particular device configuration has issues.
Now that COVID has forced intense innovation over the last two months in the media space, there may be a few more options available to us.
I’ll be looking into all of these again this week as we wind down Theatrical-At-Home for Phoenix, Oregon and ramp up digital!
♡ Annie