America’s Baseball Moves Toward Paperless Tickets

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America's Baseball Moves Toward Paperless Tickets
By Ben Fischer

Like just about every other kind of media, baseball tickets are going mobile in a big way.

As Citi Field and baseball stadiums across the country hosted opening day Monday, experts said 2014 will be a tipping point into the mainstream for paperless mobile tickets, and the ramifications for sellers, consumers and even entrepreneurs are big.

Across Major League Baseball, mobile usage will double from 2012 levels this year, up to "20 to 30 percent" of all tickets, MLB Advanced Media LP CEO Bob Bowman projected in an interview. Digital event attendance is fraught with policy and customer-relations issues, and powerful forces can see the opportunities presented very differently. But ultimately, fans want them, Bowman said.

"It's a lead pipe cinch it's going to happen," Bowman said. "At first we were worried that maybe we were forcing the issue before the fans were ready for it, but that does not seem to be the case."

Once you take paper out of the equation for event attendance, a few things happen. For starters, teams can know exactly who used the tickets. Leagues and teams see the potential to launch customer loyalty programs, re-targeting of previous buyers and new ways to ensure against fraud.

Late last fall, the New York-based digital arm of Major League Baseball launched a new feature within its AtBat app, called "My Tickets Mobile," for both season- and single-game ticket holders to manage tickets and augment their ballpark experience. It can transfer just the tickets, or the tickets and built up rewards, Bowman said. The Mets and Citi Field were among the first tranche of stadiums to be included. (MLB has allowed basic ticketing through Apple iOS' Passbook for several years, and the Mets started with Passbook at the beginning of the 2013 season.)

As tickets move toward mobile, brokerages that host resale platforms think their service will become even more popular as the last analog step leaves the process. Will Flaherty, director of communications at New York-based SeatGeek.com, says their customers have generally encountered few problems entering stadiums using a digital PDF on their phone, regardless of who the seller is. But even though any standard barcode scanner works as well on a phone as it does paper (think Groupon deals at restaurants, for instance), many stadiums, including Yankee Stadium, still discourage paperless second-market tickets.

For entrepreneurs intent on disrupting the ticket game, the most interesting angle of this mobile trend is price flexibility and market awareness in the crucial final hours before a game, when ticket prices often plummet.

"If you can hold out, you're in a really good spot as a buyer," said Brad Griffith, CEO of a fledgling San Francisco startup GameTime, a smartphone ticketing app that claims to eliminate paper from all unofficial second-market transactions.

Last month, GameTime expanded to New York. For now, GameTime only works for Madison Square Garden, the Prudential Center in Newark and Barclays Center. But they are putting the final touches on Citi Field and Yankee Stadium as well, and Griffith believes baseball — with its 81 home games every year (twice as many as any other sport) — offers the best chance for user growth.

Baseball tickets bought on the day of the game are 40 percent cheaper than the same seat purchased a month earlier, according to SeatGeek stats. But in those final, harried hours before a big game, fans in bars, on the street or on subway trains too often can't print their ticket, limiting their ability to exploit the market. Last-second activity will skyrocket, Griffith thinks, if they can be sure they don't need a printer.

"There's this new power fan, and that power fan essentially would be a season ticket holder, but isn't, because it's so easy to buy tickets at the last second and capitalize on that market inefficiency," Griffith said.

On mobile, tickets can be repriced almost instantaneously. Teams may see this as a chance to raise prices on the direct market (a la last-second business travel), which opens a new opportunity for the second market, Flaherty said.

But GameTime could be limited by stadiums' willingness to accept digital tickets from unofficial sources. (Those "power users" he talks about are a direct threat to the teams' lifeblood of season ticket sales.)

If tickets are acquired directly from the team, teams and leagues see no downside to mobile, as the rapid adoption across baseball of the Passbook app and the MyTicketMobile program illustrates. But second market seats are more of a gray area.

Tickets acquired on the Yankees' official ticket exchange (a partnership with TicketMaster) still generally need to be printed out, a customer service agent said. And in Boston, the basketball/hockey arena TD Garden recently prohibited PDF images of ticket barcodes and now requires the original ticket image on the phone.

"I'm fascinated by teams effectively banning convenience for fans," Griffith said. "It's a really interesting phenomenon. Most of what I've seen is embracing mobile and trying to make a better experience for fans who attend – after all, TV is fierce competition (replays, couch, relatively free beer)."

The Boston justification was security, and consumer protection is often the issue that spurs legislation on this subject. In 2011, New York state passed a law that prohibits teams from issuing non-transferrable paperless tickets, which the Yankees opposed.

Bowman, of MLB Advanced Media, and Flaherty, from SeatGeek, both see mobile as a solution to, not a contributor to, fraud concerns. "I actually believe putting tickets on the phone is one of the most secure things you can do," Bowman said.

Every team and stadium is moving toward mobile at a different pace. The Mets and Yankees did not respond to my questions in time for this article, but they are not moving as aggressively as, say, the Atlanta Braves. The Braves put a premium price on season tickets acquired on paper, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are not printing season tickets at all.

Bowman, the CEO of MLB Advanced Media, sees little reason to limit mobile ticketing. That goes for second-market tickets too, he said.

"I think you have some venues and some interested parties, they may not want it," he said. "They may want to hurt the sales in the second [market] and keep it in the primary. But our view, and we're partners with Stubhub, is that when you buy through Stubhub that's a legitimate transaction and that barcode should be honored."

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April 17, 2014 at 9:36 AM