Seat Watch for BookMyShow & District

A big release is never as sold out as it looks. Cinemas hold seats back — for distributors, for staff, for corporate blocks, for whoever might still call. When nobody calls, those seats go back on sale. Often in the last hours before the show, sometimes minutes before it. On an opening weekend that is frequently the only inventory left. Nobody announces it. The listing just quietly changes, and by the time you think to look again the good rows are gone. Refreshing a page every few minutes for three hours is the manual version of this extension, and it's a bad way to spend an evening. The other reason to use it is simpler: you want THAT screen. The IMAX one, the one with the right rake, the one where the sound is actually set up. The same film in a worse room isn't the same evening out — so "sold out" there is worth waiting on rather than settling around. Both cases have the same shape. You don't want a seat, you want THOSE seats. So pick the showtimes you care about, say how many seats you need together and where in the hall you'll accept them, and get a notification the moment a matching block appears. Click it to land straight on the seat map. TWO SITES, AND A REASON TO USE BOTH BookMyShow and District both sell the same cinemas, and they do NOT hold the same seats back. A show that is sold out on one can have a row free on the other, and when a block is released it rarely appears on both at the same moment. So the same showing is worth watching twice, and the popup tells you which site each watch is for. HOW YOU ADD A SHOW Search either site the way you normally would — by cinema or by film — and open its showtimes. Every showtime picks up a small + in its corner. Click it. The film, format, cinema and start time are filled in for you. Sold-out showtimes get the button too, and they're the ones worth using it on. WHEN A FILM ISN'T ON SALE YET The + needs a showtime to exist before you can click it, and that is its limit: by the time a first-day show is listed, the seats worth having are often gone. So a film that isn't on sale yet gets a bell instead. It attaches to the FILM, not to a showing, which means you can set it weeks early — before there is anything to book. Pick the cinemas you would actually go to and you are told which of them opened. Leave it empty and any cinema counts. On BookMyShow the bell is on the upcoming-movies list and on a film's own page. On District you search for the film. District publishes no upcoming list, and a film that isn't on sale yet appears in no other listing there, so typing its name into District's own search is the way to reach it — the bell is on the page you land on. A film out in several languages opens one language at a time, and each gets its own alert and its own link. On BookMyShow it also watches the night before release, because premieres, benefit shows and 1am previews run before a film is officially out — and for a big release those are often the first tickets on sale. You are told which day opened, and taken to that day's listing. Nothing is polled while a release is months away. A watch sleeps until a week before the release date, which you can change, and is dropped once the film is out. WHAT COUNTS AS A MATCH Not just "a seat is free" — the seats you'd actually buy: • How many free seats side by side, with no aisle between them • Where in the hall: anywhere, the middle half, or dead centre • How many rows to skip at the front • Only the seats the site marks as its best, if you like Set them once as defaults, or per show. HOW OFTEN IT CHECKS Every show runs on its own clock, so tonight's screening is watched hard while one next week is barely touched — 90 seconds under three hours to showtime, half an hour when it's more than a day away. All five intervals are yours to change. A show is dropped six hours after it has played. WHERE ALERTS GO A desktop notification, always. Optionally also to Telegram or to a webhook — a Discord channel or an ntfy.sh topic both work with a single address pasted in. Telegram takes as many destinations as you like, and a group counts as one. So one person can run it and a whole group of friends gets told at once — whoever is free taps Book now in the alert and goes. Each destination is sent to independently: if the bot is removed from one group, everyone else still hears about it. FROM YOUR PHONE You are rarely at the laptop when you think of a film — you are at the mall, or out with family. Share the film from the BookMyShow or District app to your own Telegram bot and the laptop at home starts watching it. A film not yet on sale becomes a booking-opens watch. One already selling gets asked, in the chat, which language, which day, which cinema and which showtime — every cinema showing it is offered, not only ones you picked in advance. Seat alerts arrive as a picture of the hall with the free seats marked. /watching lists everything, and "stop <film>" stops one. The laptop still does the checking, so it has to be on and awake at home. Your phone only tells it what to watch. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO There is no server behind this. Nobody operates a service, so there is nowhere for your data to be collected or sold. Your watch list and settings live in your own browser. Checks run in your own Chrome, using the session you're already signed in with — nothing is proxied, nothing is replayed, and no credentials are handled. District answers seat maps as data rather than as a page, so those checks need nothing on screen and no sign-in — only that Chrome has visited district.in; BookMyShow's need a visible window, which the extension opens and the welcome page explains. It does not book, hold, or pay for anything. It tells you, and you decide. ONE THING TO SET UP Nothing runs while your machine is asleep — and the release you're waiting for tends to land late in the evening, exactly when a laptop has nodded off. Stop it sleeping for the evening, and keep the display on: on a Mac, "…