yes, we're targeting the teams/concerts with the highest percentage of unsold seats and we're focused on upgrades once a game/show starts. fans will have to have a ticket and already be at the game/show. we're giving fans the freedom to roam while at the same time generating revenue for all seats that would otherwise have been empty (13,000 seats per game at tampa bay rays games for example - MLB averaged 68% occupancy in 2010).
There's definitely a market for such a service. I've been to many games and concerts and would gladly pay an upgrade if I could. However, I see this as a feature and not a full blown product. Tickets.com or LiveNation can easily add this feature in since they are already heavily integrated into the team's ticket inventory. What's keeping the big boys from adding such a feature already?
(I'm not knocking your product, b/c I'd love to use it once it becomes a available).
Great question Allan, thanks for asking. Number of reasons here, one being that mobile ticketing technology is at beginning stages of adoption. Second, its not too tough to integrate with some venues and team's ticket inventory, at least for the open systems.
Also, ticketmaster is required by their existing contracts to return all unsold tickets (and they sell about 70% of the tickets) and $$$ to the venue for tickets they did sell for the venue 2hrs before game begins. We will fit into the ecosystem at game start and will be selling any unsold venue inventory (including the inventory sent back from ticketmaster).
From our conversations with industry consultants, ticketmaster is a mess, built on old technology and given the size they have reached with merger with Live Nation they would have a lot of trouble managing a real time tech given their tech foundation. They are focused on their core business and for them to get into upgrades with mobile technology would strain them too much at this point. More importantly, most fans we talk to hate ticketmaster- notably due to their unreasonably high fees due to their top position in the industry.
We are approaching the problem of empty seats from a social angle and looking to create a social engagement fan platform where fans can do everything from our mobile platform from winning a free upgrade, to ordering concessions, to finding their friends and upgrading to a seat near them. We understand social networks and how to drive increased spend thru smart marketing such as competitions vs. other team's fans in the stadium, promotions with budweiser and so forth.
This is not either ticketmaster's or tickets.com's core business or even one they have indicated an interest in. We see a huge opportunity here and hope to become the provider of in-game data analytics from how the score, time left in game, weather, player injury during game, etc effect prices of their tickets. Since we will be facilitating and tracking not only where a fan is initially sitting but also any activity they engage, including moving to a better seat, it will be easy to collect a ton of useful data.
There are about 150 ticketing systems out there, tickets.com being one of the major ones and there is a lot of fragmentation and chaos happening in the industry. We want to provide an option for white label ticketing system providers (white label just means they sell thru the venue's website rather than their own like ticketmaster.com does) to license our pogoseat platform or just the ticketing upgrade saas.
So if we execute correctly and bring enough value from the fan interaction, social engagement and excitement angle we will be partnering with someone like tickets.com rather than competing against them.
Our primary competition will be ticketing systems that decide to create the functionality of in game seat upgrades. However, such ticketing systems like Veritix, Outbox and Pacolian will be fundamentally limited in that any upgrade functionality they create will likely only be used within their family of venues (AEG being the largest with 105 venues) and they are unlikely to license to their competitors or their competitors to pay them money for this add on features. Our goal will be to create groundswell from the fan perspective.
As Abel said, the 800 pound gorilla in the room, LiveNation/Ticketmaster (around 3000 venues) is having enough trouble just trying to put out daily fires, thus effectively stifling any innovation designs they may have.
