Ticketmaster Corp, the Los Angeles, California-based on-line ticket retailer, is to triple the bandwidth of its US web site later this year, while its UK subsidiary yesterday launched an equivalent real-time transactional web site for the sale of tickets to events in its territory. The US site has been in existence for a year and a half, and the company says it is having to increase its bandwidth in order to meet growing demand. In March it sold 196,000 tickets, receiving some 70,000 visitors each day. The company says it sold 1 million tickets from its site in the US last year. The webmaster for the UK site, Stuart Thomas, said the company wants to add a European feel to its UK site. In addition, Ticketmaster UK plans to start offering web site development services to major client venues, setting up the site for, say, a provincial theater then creating a hyperlink out to it from the Ticketmaster site. Also to be developed is a special service for regular customers, called Ticketmaster Priority, whereby they can receive information about forthcoming events, enter the company’s site and avoid queues.
