SAN FRANCISCO -- Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch on Tuesday unveiled its first local city guide designed around Ticketmaster's e-commerce capabilities.
The company with the unwieldy name was simply CitySearch until last summer. CitySearch was bought last August by Ticketmaster Online, a unit of Barry Diller's USA Network, with the idea of creating an online entertainment guide that had ticket-purchasing capabilities deeply woven into it.
The CitySearch Denver site is the first to showcase the collaboration of the newly merged companies. Chief executive Charles Conn dubbed the product the first real "local portal."
"With a few clicks of the mouse, you could plan a complete evening out," Conn told a group of institutional investors at the NationsBanc Montgomery Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco. He demonstrated how a surfer might read a CitySearch-penned article about an upcoming movie or concert, then buy a ticket. With the evening's entertainment lined up, he might next select a map of restaurants near the event venue, then email a reservation.
Conn also seized the occasion of a captive lunch-time audience to unveil My Ticketmaster, a service that can be customized to alert surfers of upcoming events that might interest them. The bells and whistles include a feature that previews the available seats in 3-D for about 50 venues across the country.
After guiding the audience through a dizzying fly-by of the mezzanine in Madison Square Garden, Conn dubbed the service one of the first "practical" uses of 3-D on the Web and promised more venues to be added.
Conn also outlined a sea change in Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch's (TMCS) strategy: a plan to launch a series of new city guides that it will own outright.
Prior to Ticketmaster's acquisition, CitySearch had set out to line up partnerships with local newspapers to set up local city guides. It costs a lot less to set up a site with a partner, but the partner also gets much of the revenue.
With coffers flush from its successful December IPO, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch can now afford to go it alone, Conn said.
"We're not as dependent on partners," Conn said. "Our intention is to open up quite a lot of owned and operated markets."
Analysts, he said, were predicting 10 new Ticketmaster CitySearch sites by the end of the year. Conn said it might be even more.
