9781422286784

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

stem in sports: technology

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