Front Gate Tickets, a provider of promoting, ticketing and managing services for live events, has developed a radio frequency identification system to help concert producers track the flow of ticket holders entering their events, as well as offer a variety of additional services, such as VIP access, social networking for ticket holders, and demographic information regarding ticket buyers. The solution features tickets in the form of RFID-enabled wristbands that can be read at entrance gates, with the capability of being read by fixed or handheld interrogators throughout a park.
The company is based in Austin, Texas, and the first customer for its RFID solution was events-management firm C3 Presents, for use during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, held in October 2010. Passive high-frequency (HF) 13.56 MHz inlays, compliant with the ISO 15693 standard, were embedded in Laminex wristbands worn by the festival’s approximately 25,000 attendees. Front Gate Tickets indicates it selected HF inlays (in this case, those made with chips provided by Texas Instruments) rather than ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) inlays because the HF versions are considerably less expensive.
The process of employing handheld RFID devices at gates to read the RFID-enabled wristband of each arriving concertgoer was similar to that for the bar-code solutions that C3 Presents (which has declined to be interviewed for this story) had previously used. Because the RFID system proved capable of reading and storing RFID data at the event, says David Avery, Front Gate Tickets’ director of technology, the company is now prepared to offer additional RFID-based services, such as the ability to restrict access to certain areas for particular ticket holders; provide data to a promoter regarding where and when specific concertgoers arrived, or the areas that they visited within a concert park; and enable an attendee to pay for food and beverages within the concert grounds, using a preloaded or credit-card account linked to the unique RFID number of his or her wristband tag.
According to Avery, the firm is in discussions this year with several event-marketing businesses, as well as sponsors and concessions companies, to also consider a variety of RFID-enabled options, including enabling a ticket holder to access social-networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter, with a unique ID number linked to his or her network access data.
Since 2005, Front Gate Tickets has offered a bar-code solution enabling concert-management staff stationed at entranceways to scan tickets’ bar codes, or to visually inspect and approve them for admission. For several years, the company has been considering an RFID solution that would allow further options, though it had initially considered the technology to be too costly.
However, Avery says, by 2009, many of Front Gate Tickets’ concert-producing customers had some personal experience with radio frequency identification—for example, seeing the technology in use on cruise ships. Last year, C3 Presents agreed to employ RFID at the three-day, eight-stage Austin City Limits program (which hosted 130 performing bands) as a way to test the technology’s success in a simple process—purely for gate entrance.The company provided C3 Presents’ staff with Motorola MC70 and MC75 handheld computers (which Front Gate Tickets was already utilizing for bar-code scanning) equipped with snap-on RFID readers provided by Technology Solutions (UK) Ltd.. “We needed a system that was very simple,” Avery states, “since many of the staff were being trained to use the readers that same morning (of the event).” The event’s managers assigned employees armed with RFID readers to each of the two gates, with 15 interrogators stationed at each gate in total.
Front Gate Tickets provided its own ticket-management software, loaded on the handheld devices and also in the company’s back-end system. For use with RFID, the firm simply modified its existing management software to receive and interpret data from the RFID readers when they were plugged into the back-end system via a USB connection prior to and after the event. The solution was designed to accept information from both a handheld’s bar-code scanner and its RFID reader. Upon arriving at the box office, each attendee would pay for admission and receive an RFID wristband instead of a paper ticket. According to Front Gate Tickets, the wristband tag’s ID number did not link to that ticket holder in any way.
As an attendee approached an entry gate, his or her wristband’s RFID tag was read. Software loaded on the handheld determined whether a successful read was accomplished, and then illuminated a green light on the device to indicate the RFID number’s acceptance. If the system had been set up to differentiate between different types of ticket holders—such as VIP versus general-entry—a red light illuminated on the handheld would have indicated that the tag was read, but that the individual could not be admitted to a specific area of the concert park.
The system provided C3 Events with data regarding the number of visitors arriving at any given time—the same information that a bar-code system would have provided, Avery notes. However, he says, by proving the RFID system works, the company can now offer solutions that can take advantage of other data available only with RFID technology. For example, Front Gate Tickets hopes that C3 Presents will opt to deploy the RFID system for this year’s Lollapalooza music festival, held in Chicago’s Grant Park. If a single customer were to purchase four tickets for Lollapalooza, for instance, that individual could provide basic demographic information for his or her group, thereby enabling event managers to track the kinds of attendees who enter, and when, as well as which parts of the park they visit, if RFID readers were installed at various locations, such as at the concession area, or at the front of the stage. In addition, a ticket holder could choose to provide further information to help link that person to his or her Facebook account, or to other networking sites, in order to share information with friends about the concert being attended, simply by tapping his or her wristband against a reader.
If the concert promoter or concessions company were to request it, the system could also enable a ticket holder to input prepayment or credit-card information into Front Gate Tickets’ software system, to be linked to the unique ID number on that customer’s wristband. The wristband could then be read at a point of sale by, for example, the concessions company’s staff. To date, however, no concert promoters have committed to using such services.
Additionally, Front Gate Tickets hopes to evolve its solution to one that utilizes UHF RFID technology, thereby allowing fixed readers to capture tag IDs from a greater distance, and thus making the gathering of data from RFID-enabled wristbands simpler, without requiring a wearer to present his or her wristband to a worker armed with an interrogator.