Comcast's Fandango developing scannerless movie tickets for smartphones

Fandango, the nation's biggest online seller of movie tickets and a part of the Comcast Corp. entertainment empire, is developing a self-authenticating ticket that can be sent to a smartphone then flashed at a theater ticket-taker.

The technology is similar to that used for boarding passes at airports that are scanned from smartphone screens, though Fandango says it does not expect ticket-takers to scan movie tickets.

Instead, Fandango says, its "scannerless tickets" will self-authenticate through digital watermarks floating on a smartphone's screen and the phone's GPS, which will confirm the ticket buyer is in the correct theater.

Fandango says there have been 49 million downloads of its phone app - a potential customer base for scannerless tickets. It charges a fee of $1 to $2 for those who order movie tickets through the Fandango website or app.

"The ticket-taker will only look [at the phone's screen] and verify the ticket is authentic," Fandango president Paul Yanover said in a phone interview. "We are right now in the testing stage, or beta."

Fandango is testing scannerless tickets in about 50 theaters in the United States and hopes to introduce them nationwide in six months, a spokeswoman said Monday.

About half of U.S. movie theaters now scan tickets sold through Fandango off smartphones. But scannerless tickets will be easier for both moviegoers and theaters, Fandango says.

Scannerless-ticket technology is one of several ideas the company is pursuing related to smartphones, Yanover said. Another is making movie-related content, trailers or movie factoids, available on smartphones.

On Monday, Fandango announced it had launched a new research-and-development unit, FandangoLabs, with an advisory board composed of industry executives from Walt Disney Co., 20th Century Fox, and theater operator Regal Entertainment, among others. Fandango itself is consolidated in Comcast under NBCUniversal, which owns the Universal film studio.

"The big idea is that we have tremendous opportunity to unlock new experiences through mobile devices," Yanover said.

FandangoLabs expects to begin offering new products in 2016. The scannerless ticket would not be considered a product of FandangoLabs because it was developed before the unit was formally created.

Based in West Los Angeles with about 200 employees, Fandango was launched in 2000 by theater-chain operators and venture-capital investors. Comcast bought it in 2007.

The Comcast unit does not disclose its revenue, but it says that it sells tickets for films showing on 27,000 U.S. movie screens, and that it accounted for 29 percent of the domestic box office for Fifty Shades of Grey's opening weekend in February and 22 percent of The Hunger Games' opening weekend in 2012.

The company recently bought Brazil's largest online ticket-seller, Ingresso. Published reports say Fandango paid $71 million.

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