Two Services to Sell Tickets on Cellphones

Wall Street Journal
By SARA SILVER and ETHAN SMITH

Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. and Tickets.com Inc. are launching services to let customers buy tickets directly from their mobile phones, in an ambitious attempt to extend Internet commerce to cellphone screens.

Starting this month, U.S. and Canadian BlackBerry users will be able to search Ticketmaster's inventory and purchase tickets on their handsets. Tickets.com will let baseball fans buy and receive tickets via cellphone from 13 Major League Baseball teams starting with the April 10 opening home game of the Oakland A's. Tickets.com is a subsidiary of MLB Advanced Media, LP, the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball.

The push for mobile ticketing comes as customers shift to smart phones, whose faster networks and larger screens come closer to the feel of ordering via computer. While the wireless industry has long awaited the time when cellphones would be used for buying, most purchases have so far been for items consumed on the phone itself, such as ringtones, wallpaper and music.

Mobile ticketing will provide an early case to see how customers take to the new platform. Both deals are aimed at audiences -- BlackBerry users and baseball fans -- known as early adopters of new technologies.

Ticketmaster President Eric Korman draws a comparison with online sales, which have grown rapidly in the past decade, from a small sliver of the company's business to the dominant way people buy tickets. "Today Ticketmaster sells 72% of its tickets online," Mr. Korman says. "That started as a small number 10 years ago."

Baseball fans are increasingly using mobile phones to check game scores, and asking that tickets be sent as barcodes to their mobile phones. MLB sold 32 million tickets last year. Noah Garden, an executive vice president at MLB.com, said he expects mobile ticketing to account for 20% to 40% of the total in 2011.

Baseball promoters are especially eager to spur last-minute purchases of seats, since clubs need to move tickets to 81 home games each season, compared with eight home games for National Football League teams. "I think mobile phones will have a tremendous impact on moving distressed inventory," said Larry Witherspoon, chief executive of Tickets.com.

Previous mobile-ticketing efforts have required customers to connect to an operator to complete the purchase and then return to their computer to print out a receipt. That was mostly due to the technical limits of barcode scanners at airports and venues, which have trouble reading off a brightly lit screen.

"The challenge is not all the digital technology in delivering the ticket, it's the physical technology in getting through the gate," said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Tickets.com last year started delivering barcodes to mobile phones, letting holders scan their phones at special turnstiles to enter a venue, and will now let customers complete the entire purchase via phone. "They don't need a computer or a call center," to complete the purchase, said Mr. Witherspoon.

Tickets.com hired UsableNet of New York, which converts Web sites into a format that can be read by 5,000 devices running on different networks. The company has devised sites for Sears.com customers to shop for refrigerators and New York residents to pay utility bills.

Ticketmaster and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., which announced their exclusive partnership in September, have been working together to design the software platform. The feature is part of RIM's investment to spread its devices from the hard-core business user to the mass market. "It's bringing e-commerce to your belt," said RIM's co-chief executive, Jim Balsillie.