Sign up for IQ Index
The latest industry news to your inbox.
The tech wizards of StubHub are at it again: Just over four months after creating the world’s first concert-recommending chatbot, the secondary ticketing site today unveiled the first ticketing app for Apple TV.
“We know that most people will be interacting with our app from their couch, as they’re looking for something to do,” comments StubHub’s director of mobile product, Marcus Shelksohn, “so we kept the StubHub app for Apple TV focused on browsability and discovery, to better motivate people to get up and get out.
“We kept the StubHub app for Apple TV focused on browsability and discovery, to better motivate people to get up and get out”
“The StubHub design team wanted to create a more custom interface to reflect the emotional nature of event discovery, and the result is an engaging look and feel that maximises event imagery and seat maps and is highly intuitive to navigate.”
Like the Skype chatbot, the Apple TV app will focus on event discovery – “less transactional and more emotional”, says StubHub – and builds on the eBay-owned company’s goal to be “everywhere there customers are, across multiple screens via multiple devices”.
It is designed for the fourth generation of Apple’s digital media player, launched last October, and is so far only available in the US.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.
Video chat service Skype has rolled out a suite of new third-party chatbots, among them a StubHub bot that ‘talks’ to users and recommends events in their local area.
The chatbot was developed at the Bot Hackathon at Skype’s offices in Palo Alto, California, in late June by StubHub engineers Pablo Flores and Carlos Lopez and joins other bots by flight comparison sites Skyscanner and Hipmunk, task automator IFTTT and, er, Spock from Star Trek.
The event, co-sponsored by Skype and Microsoft, aimed to develop a new framework that will allow developers to build bots that also work on Facebook Messenger, Kik Messenger and SMS.
“StubHub for Skype makes finding your next great experience as easy as chatting with friends”
“We’ve been working closely with StubHub, one of the world’s largest ticket marketplaces, to bring you a fun, simple way to find your tickets to an amazing event,” says a statement from Skype. “Add the StubHub bot to find tickets to some of life’s most memorable artists, athletes, performers and experiences – all in one chat. StubHub for Skype makes finding your next great experience as easy as chatting with friends.”
In May IQ spoke to Dave Cotter, the CEO of Seattle tech start-up ReplyYes, which has sold over US$1 million worth of vinyl records using its own chatbots, who predicted the technology could also be applied to concert tickets.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.