Aventus provides an open-source protocol that allows rights-holders to define rules across the ticketing supply chain – including promoters, venues and agents.
TheTicketingBusiness.com caught up with Aventus to find out about the company’s perspectives of the ticketing industry…
Q: Sum up today’s ticketing industry in three words…
A: Fragmented, siloed, innovative.
Q: What’s the best thing about the ticketing industry?
A: The ticketing industry is complex and constantly changing. Combined with great people, this means that the industry is always creating opportunities and creative ways to solve new problems. At their most simple, tickets are the transactional medium but the reality is that they are the gateway to experiences that connect people with their peers and idols.
Q: And what’s your biggest bugbear?
A: One of our biggest bugbears is that with cryptocurrency markets dominating the news a lot of ticketing conversations related to using blockchain are about “crypto” instead of the unique features and benefits that are made possible by blockchain technology.
Q: Five years from now, will ticketing have gone completely paperless?
A: We believe that the range of benefits provided by “smart tickets” to all participants in the ticket ecosystem, from venues, teams, artists, theatres, and attendees themselves, will mean that the tipping point for paperless will come sooner rather than later. It’s unlikely that paper tickets will disappear entirely but we think they’ll represent only a marginal fraction of the inventory.
Q: What are the most important issues for the ticketing industry over the next five years?
A: As the world gets increasingly connected, and customers expect ever more integrated services, the big question coming down the line is whether the industry will seek to develop a degree of interoperability. It has also been interesting to see the recent global developments in regulation around secondary markets. The industry will need to respond and support these legislative changes that increasingly impact on the way that the ticket business operates.
Q: How do you expect the live experience for fans and spectators to change in the coming years?
A: We see a more connected and personalised world of live entertainment. When it’s possible to know who is “in the room” it will make the development and deployment of personalised AR at an event even more compelling. It will also dramatically shift engagement opportunities for fans. Personalisation can often be seen as a trade-off against privacy, and that is a decision that fans will need to take themselves.
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the ticketing business sector?
A: While the recent foray into ticketing didn’t end well for Amazon, the industry would be extremely short-sighted to imagine that competition is not going to come from outside the space with innovative business models, content and marketing capabilities.
Q: What do you think will be the most important technological change in the industry over the next five years?
A: Some things never change, and tickets being a driver of value and behaviour are two of those things, but how they do this as the shift to mobile accelerates is going to create real innovation. Irrespective of the implementation, it is our firm belief that decentralised networks that provide ongoing control, trust, consistency and interoperability are going to deliver some of the most significant changes to the industry.
Q: Prediction time… for the ticketing industry, 2019 will be the year of…?
A: Smart, personalised, mobile-first tickets.
Q: If you could travel back in time and buy a ticket for any historic event in the sports and entertainment industry, what would it be?
A: It would have to be a coin-flip between the first Olympic Games or Woodstock.
For more information about Aventus, click here.