Ask HN: How Can the Sports Industry be Disrupted?
I'm a sports fanatic, plain and simple. I love to watch and play almost any sport. Favorite is soccer (I've played my entire life) by far, followed respectively by football, hockey, basketball, tennis and baseball. But with any of them, I just can't find a 'problem' with it. Maybe I'm trying too hard to look. But the only things that seem to do well is verification technology (GoalCam in hockey, Zoom-in technology for refs, etc.). Isn't there something else that can be done?
One idea was to allow for people to upgrade their tickets in-game. So let's say I'm sitting in the nosebleed section (really high up) but I really want to move closer to the action...I would open x app on my phone and see what open seats are closer. Once I find one that I like, I can pay for it right on the app (I take a cut of sales) and head down to those seats. But then I quickly realized it would be pricey and I don't think it's something that many people want.
There's gotta be more...
If you have any ideas you'd be open to discussing, ping me: aashayk @ Googles Email Service
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10 comments
| 8 points
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I mean, look at that whole MoneyBall thing: instead of trying to focus on understanding why people come to games, the Oakland A' focused on optimizing performance for less, not necessarily more profit for less. So, instead of being disruptive on the business model side, it's disruptive on the game-itself-side. This kind of sentiment is shockingly pervasive.
On the other hand, look at the Giants. The Giants--and you no doubt know about this--do this dynamic pricing where they charge ticket prices based on weather, who's playing, etc, in order to optimize the amount of people coming to games. The focus is business-side. Interestingly, maybe keeping a full stadium is why the Giants win so much.
Shoot, what if you did that but with Machine Learning for all aspects of what the teams sell…tickets to souvenirs to hotdogs. And what if you made it so teams could email fans (or through some push on an app) saying, 'hey, free tickets today!'. And then what if you brought that to smaller organizations like the minor leagues and then to the NCAA. How many NCAA teams are there, like 10000?
The upwards trend of TV contracts clearly isn't sustainable, but trying to extract the maximum value from your attendees just seems less interesting at the present.
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