It’s a sad day here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area if you’re a Texas Rangers fan. Last night, the team lost out of advancing to the playoffs, and trips to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington are no more.
Come next spring, though, excitement of a new season and its possibilities will percolate. And besides the pleasures of sitting in the outfield and eating unlimited hot dogs, fans will have a greater chance of interacting with the stadium itself.
Last week, Major League Baseball introduced a partnership with Apple’s iBeacon technology to offer location-based information and offers for At the Ballpark app users.
“A little-known piece of technology baked into Apple’s iOS 7 lets app developers place physical touchstones called iBeacons around specific locations,” wrote Caitlin McGarry for Macworld. “Those beacons can prompt users to take an action or provide information when they are within the beacon’s radius. iBeacons use BLTE (Bluetooth low energy) technology for micro-location information.”
For example, the app will send notification discounts about food and merchandise based on an user’s location in the stadium.
“Once you start seeing what MLB (and plenty of other organizations like it) can do with iBeacons, it makes sense why Bluetooth Low Energy is suddenly so in vogue,” wrote Chris Valazco for TechCrunch. “The level of targeting and reach that a smartly assembled array of Bluetooth beacons provides could profoundly change how companies try to interact with us for better or worse. It certainly doesn’t hurt that support for Bluetooth LE is something both Apple and Google have committed to either—iDevices as old as the 4S can take advantage of these features if they’re running iOS 7, and Google confirmed that Bluetooth LE support would be one of the main additions to Android 4.3. That means a huge swath of the devices out there and in the pipeline will be ready to, well, play ball with this newfangled approach to interaction.”
What other tools are stadiums using to keep the fans coming out to events? Register for the 2013 Stadiums Hybrid Meeting to find out. Presented by industry veterans, this hybrid meeting will explore these challenges and highlight some of the innovative approaches sports teams, event promoters, and stadium operators are taking to make the in-stadium experience something fans do not want to miss.
(Image via Flickr: Steven Martin/Creative Commons)
