Ticketing and venue booking is the software through which people buy seats for a film, a concert, a play or a cricket match, and book a badminton court or a football turf by the hour. You pick the show, choose your seats on a seat map, pay, and get a QR code to show at the door. India's cinema and live-event market is one of the largest in the world by the number of tickets sold.
An online ticketing platform does not own the cinemas or the stadiums. It connects to each venue's own booking system, and shows which seats are free at that moment. When you choose a seat, the platform holds it for a few minutes while you pay. This is seat selection and reservation. Then it issues the ticket.
Here is a typical weekend. You live in Kochi. On Saturday morning, you and five friends want to play badminton. You open a sports venue booking app, find a court 3 km away that is free from 7 to 8 am, and book it. Each friend pays you their part on a UPI app.
On Saturday afternoon, you book two seats for the evening show of a new Malayalam film. The ticketing platform shows the seat map of the cinema's screen 2. You choose two seats in row H, and you pay ₹460 for the tickets plus a convenience fee, through a payment gateway. A QR code arrives on your phone. At the cinema, an usher scans it. The film itself does not come on a reel. It is played from a digital file by a digital cinema server in the projection room.
Next month, a comedy show is coming to the city's convention centre. The centre's venue management software records the booking of the hall, the seating plan, the staff and the security for that evening. The seats are put on sale through the ticketing platform.
How do ticketing platforms earn? In India, they usually add a convenience fee to each ticket. They also charge venues and organisers for selling and promoting their shows. Some platforms organise concerts and festivals themselves, and so earn from the whole event, not only the tickets.
The hardest moment is a big sale. When tickets for a famous singer's concert go on sale, millions of people may try to buy at the same minute. This is a problem of high concurrency. The platform puts buyers in a virtual waiting room, so that its systems are not overwhelmed. It also has to stop bots, programs that buy tickets in bulk so that touts can resell them at a higher price. Some platforms are now trying dynamic pricing, in which the price of a seat rises as a show sells out, as airline fares do.