For diehard football fans, few activities beat watching your team (read: The Patriots) in the Superbowl with the rich company of some frosty six-packs, melty nachos and fellow jersey-clad friends and family members.
Except, of course, if you have the chance to witness your players storm the field and throw around the pigskin in person.
But let’s be realistic: Once your team makes it to the final two, the scramble for tickets to the Superbowl causes the prices to skyrocket. Few people have the seemingly bottomless bank accounts to afford dropping a few grand for nosebleed seats at the big game, much less the cash necessary for all the other expenditures: travel, hotel rooms, food and drink.
Wouldn’t it be great if, given your team’s golden season, you could somehow secure your ticket to the Superbowl before that scramble, at a more affordable rate?
Teamtix Marketplace hopes to help you do just that by allowing fans to reserve face-value tickets for Superbowl XLVIII that they only have to pay for if their team makes it all the way.
The company behind the marketplace is Chicago-based startup Forward Market Media, which also holds an engineering arm in Boston. In fact, the algorithm powering the platform was invented at MIT, says the startup’s CEO Rick Harmon.
Channelling a similar spirit to fantasy sports, the platform acts as a reservation system that “allows people within the marketplace to buy and trade their forward rights on a real-time basis,” explained Harmon.
“The worst seat in the house will sell for at least $2,600, and the price will only go up closer to game time,” the CEO told BostInno in a conversation. With Teamtix’s platform, however, the most you’ll end up paying for a ticket to the Superbowl is its face value price, which starts around $1,000.
In essence, reserving the right to buy a ticket on Teamtix’s platform is a gamble on how confident you are that your team will make it to the game in question (the platform also uses this model for other sports events around the globe). Rather than having to pay that steep sum of at least $2,600 close to game day, people can use the marketplace to reserve seats long before the game – before their team even makes it to the finals – for a few hundred dollars.
In the event that your team makes it, you can choose to either resell your reserved ticket at a higher price, or fork over the rest of the $1,000 (or corresponding face-value price) to Teamtix to sit pretty in the stands come Superbowl game day.
If it turns out your team doesn’t make it, you’ll be out a few hundred dollars, and Teamtix will make sure the ticket ends up in good hands.
Forward Market Media has also applied the Teamtix model to amenities, including hotel reservations, Broadway show tickets and travel fair.
“The digital path to consuming a live event has to be as entertaining as the live event itself,” said Harmon, of the goal of Teamtix.
Sounds to good to be true? Check out the prices to reserve your right to buy a ticket on TeamTix below. And if you’re feeling a little crazy after the New England Patriot’s face off against the Baltimore Ravens this afternoon, perhaps head over to scope out some seats on your own...
