Original article published on CBC News Canada (03/18/18)

Barcoded tickets may become obsolete as venues replace them with more secure digital tickets with codes embedded in a consumer's phone or a Wi-Fi-linked wristband. Canadian concert venues trialing such systems include Montreal's Osheaga music festival, which favors scannable wristbands over Amazon's new, cashier-free store in Seattle, Wash. Ticketmaster has called little attention to its experiments with its barcodeless Presence program, which allows venues to let fans scan e-tickets embedded with a digital token and stored on their phone or smartwatch at self-service terminals. The company says 70 venues have so far used Presence in North America and more are likely to experiment with it this year as it rolls out further. "[With Presence] there has been zero instances of fraud so far and the tech is succeeding in getting fans into venues to see their favorite live events faster and more efficiently than ever," says Ticketmaster's Justin Burleigh. Ryerson University professor Norman Shaw thinks barcodeless systems also could reduce staffing costs by making the scanning of individual items or tickets unnecessary. However, he does not foresee the wholesale abandonment of barcodes, given most alternatives require customers to have a smartphone or depend on the Internet, which can suffer outages.

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