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stem in sports: technology
The other big change in tickets is how they
are sold on a secondary market. Fans are used
to going to team Web sites to buy tickets, but
what about tickets for sold-out events? Be-
fore the Web, buying a ticket to such an event
often meant going to the event and wander-
ing the parking lots and nearby streets, hop-
ing to find a “
scalper
.” Scalpers would often
charge very high prices for what sometimes
turned out to be counterfeit tickets. Such
practices were also illegal for both buyer and
seller. The online ticket resale market, made
possible by the Web, printed PDFs, and scan-
nable bar codes, has changed all that. Now
sites such as StubHub offer a way for fans
to buy legitimate tickets and to shop online
for the best prices and seats. Pro leagues and
teams are even partnering with StubHub and
similar sites to help police against forgeries.
In a change from the days when teams fought
hard against ticket resale, today they are us-
ing technology to add to their bottom lines.
The Realities of Fantasy
T
echnology
has
turned
fantasy
sports
into
big business. The idea of fantasy sports
is that fans create “teams” of their fa-
vorite athletes that then compete against oth-
er fans’ teams in a wide variety of statistical
competitions. Baseball was the first big fanta-
sy sport, but it has been overtaken by fantasy