{"id":644165,"date":"2013-02-26T20:48:58","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T01:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=614848"},"modified":"2013-02-26T20:48:58","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T01:48:58","slug":"passbook-mobile-ticketing-expanding-to-13-mlb-ballparks-this-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/644165","title":{"rendered":"Passbook mobile ticketing expanding to 13 MLB ballparks this season"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the 2013 baseball season, Major League Baseball is more than tripling the number of stadiums that will accept mobile tickets via Apple\u2019s Passbook app. This year there will be 13 stadiums that will enable paperless ticketing via Passbook, MLB announced at a fan event in New York City Tuesday night. That\u2019s up from four last season.<\/p>\n

The teams that will start accepting Passbook tickets for the first time are the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A\u2019s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. The New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals, which began accepting Passbook last September, will again offer the service this season. MLB says there are three more teams that will enable iOS tickets this season, but that are not yet ready to make an official announcement.<\/p>\n

\"MLB<\/a>MLB was among Apple\u2019s first launch partners for Passbook, which went live with iOS 6 when it launched in September. That surely wasn\u2019t a surprise to baseball fans who know\u00a0MLB as the most tech-savvy league of all major professional sports. Major League Baseball\u2019s Advanced Media Office, which is the digital arm of the league, responsible for MLB.com, MLB.TV and the At Bat apps, is run by CEO Bob\u00a0Bowman \u2014 who\u2019s speaking at paidContent Live 2012 in April<\/a>. Bowman has made MLB a frequent and early partner of Apple when it\u2019s come to mobile tech.<\/p>\n

Last week,\u00a0MLB debuted the 2013 edition of its At Bat app for Android and iOS<\/a>, which included more live, archive and embedded video content, and a new deal to include free game audio access.<\/p>\n

He stays ahead of the tech curve by trying to anticipate what the next generation of fans \u2014 the kind that grew up with ubiquitous internet access \u2014 will want in a mobile experience and how they prefer to interact with their team.\u00a0The smartphone \u201cis the first screen, not second screen\u201d for them, he told me Tuesday. That means a mobile offering \u201chas to have everything. [The app] has to be slick. If it isn\u2019t hip, cool and easy to use, [fans] are not going to use it.\u201d That\u2019s why \u201ceverything we write and plan this is on the first screen.\u201d<\/p>\n

That includes using your phone instead of a piece of paper to get into a game, as well as using it to sort stats or watch classic video. But MLB\u2019s mobile efforts are not all iOS all the time. MLB At Bat is also on Android, a platform Bowman said is growing rapidly for MLB.<\/p>\n

Right now, he said, iOS users account for 70 percent of the free version of At Bat. But that\u2019s \u201cshrinking every day\u201d as Android has grown \u2014 he says thanks to Samsung\u2019s good mobile hardware and its growing cool factor, as well as the Google Play store being better curated by Google.<\/p>\n

However, when it comes to users that pay for At Bat \u2014 which is $20 per season \u2014 85 percent are still iOS. But that\u2019s changing too, he said. \u201cSlowly.\u201d<\/p>\n

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