An online ticketing platform is a website and app that sells seats for thousands of cinemas, theatres, concert grounds and stadiums in one place. It shows each venue's free seats, holds the seats you choose while you pay, and then issues a ticket with a QR code. It does not own the venues. It connects to each venue's own booking system, which is the system that also sells tickets at the venue's counter.
Why must it connect live? A cinema sells the same seats through several channels at once: its own counter, its own website and one or more ticketing platforms. The cinema's booking system is the one true record of which seats are sold. So the ticketing platform asks that system for the free seats every time a buyer opens a seat map. When a buyer chooses seats, the platform asks the cinema's system to hold them. This step is explained in seat selection and reservation. Large venues such as stadiums and convention centres keep their seating plans in venue management software, which sends the seat map to the platform for each event.
Take, for example, a family of four in Nagpur who want to see a Sunday matinee at a single-screen cinema. The father opens the platform's app at 10 am. The app shows the seat map for the 12:30 show, with sold seats in grey. He chooses four seats in row F, at ₹220 each. The platform asks the cinema's system to hold the four seats, and starts a timer on his screen. He pays ₹880 for the tickets plus a convenience fee of about ₹30 for each ticket, with GST on the fee. The money is collected by a payment gateway. As soon as the payment is confirmed, the platform tells the cinema's system that the four seats are sold. It then sends a QR code to his phone by SMS and in the app. At the cinema, an usher scans the code, and the system marks the tickets as used, so the same code cannot be used twice.
The platform earns in three ways. It adds a convenience fee to each ticket. It charges venues and organisers for selling and promoting their shows. Some platforms also produce concerts and festivals themselves.
Most days, the load is predictable. But when tickets for a famous band's concert or an IPL final go on sale, millions of people arrive in the same minute, which is a problem of high concurrency. The platform then places buyers in a virtual waiting room. It uses bot management to turn away programs that buy tickets for touts. Its seat maps and images are served from a content delivery network (CDN), servers in many cities that keep copies of the pages close to buyers. For cinemas, the shows that the platform sells are the ones that the cinema's digital cinema server will play.