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Vue Entertainment International (Vue) is one of the leading cinema operators in the world and it considers itself to be a pan-European market leader. Vue operates 1,741 screens at 187 state-of-the-art cinema locations, operating across nine countries. Typically, each of these cinemas operates as a live environment for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, and for 364 days of the year.

DIGITISATION OF THE CINEMA INDUSTRY
The evolution of technology has triggered massive changes in the cinema industry. The arrival of digitisation in 2007 meant that reels of 35mm film were rapidly replaced by digital cinema-projection systems. These new systems consist of a projector to display the image, a server to store the movies on, and a media block to decrypt and decode the film content.

This move to digitisation meant that Vue urgently needed a solution which enabled the monitoring and support of their entire estate of digital cinema projectors and servers. Mutiny Technology, a spin-off from Manchester University's Manchester Computing laboratory was well placed to help, having monitored Vue's conventional IT assets for more than a decade.

Roland Jones, Executive Director, Technical Services at Vue commissioned Mutiny to provide a bespoke network monitoring solution for their digital-projection equipment. He explains that, "This particular project involved the development of radical, bespoke polling software that was capable of integration with advanced digital cinema packages."

DELIVERING A CUSTOMISED, BESPOKE SOLUTION
Mutiny wrote custom polling agents for the additional devices and integrated them with the existing servers. The resulting solution sits on top of a basic auditorium-status monitoring tool provided by the digital cinema system manufacturers, and offers comprehensive, centralised performance management of the entire network. It is charged with monitoring the critical elements that underpin VUE business operations, and this in turn allows managers to react quickly and appropriately in the event of a problem.

The monitoring even extends to projector lamps, which means that when one fails to fire or if it requires replacement, members of cinema staff are alerted and can quickly rectify the issue, avoiding the need to refund disappointed cinema goers.

One challenge that Mutiny encountered was when the cinema operator changed its equipment supplier, which introduced a change from the industry standard SNMP protocol.

Mutiny CTO, Dr Andy Murray, explains that, "When Vue started the large scale adoption of Sony 4K projectors we had to develop a brand new engine to poll the entire estate using custom web services. With some fine tuning, we are very proud that the data-collection time from every screen in every Vue Cinema across the UK is down to only two minutes, meaning that any faults detected can be quickly addressed."

SCALE AND SCOPE
The Mutiny solution is currently deployed across Vue's entire estate of digital cinema projectors and servers. Roland Jones concludes that, "Mutiny is the cornerstone of our operations, polling around 5,000 devices across the UK. The people and processes that support our cinemas rely heavily on the network monitoring and alerting tool. We simply could not manage an estate of this size without the level of centralised automation and clarity of infrastructure that Mutiny affords us."

Vue has now begun a wider roll-out of the network monitoring solution, with Vue Poland already up and running and operations in Italy and Germany under review. Advancements in cinema technology such as next generation sound and lighting technology, alongside ever more sophisticated 2D and 3D projection, are taking the cinema experience to a new level. Vue is leading the way in ensuring that its entire infrastructure is effectively monitored and prepared for the future. NC