How NFC is Driving the Sports Industry’s Growth
Near field communication, or NFC is a path-breaking technology — one that enables data to be transferred between devices via radio waves albeit over limited distances. It primarily involves two parts: A chip, a.k.a. NFC tag, and a reader. While the chip can be fastened to virtually anything, the reader, whose purpose is to read the data on the NFC tag, are linked to a cloud-based system or a unified network, where the data is then processed. While it may seem rather rudimentary from the outside, you’d be surprised to know just how many novel ways this technology is being used in. Take the sports industry, for example.
This continually growing sector has had the people involved in it on a hunt for advanced technology that could help them harness the abundance of potential the former offers. So, how does NFC technology fit in this picture? Well, with the sports industry looking for ways to enhance their services as well as products, NFC help transform this sector. Let’s see exactly how it can do that.
1. Better engagement: Put together sports jerseys and NFC tags, and what do you get? A near instant medium for driving engagement. This combination has already made its way into the market, allowing sports brands to do things like offer information to users as soon as they tap the badge with their NFC-enabled mobile phones. From player profiles and match schedules to play-by-play updates, there are too many possibilities for engaging sports fans.
2. Accelerate payments and sales: The time it takes to process payments for tickets, food and beverages, and more can often prove to be a source of frustration for spectators at the sporting events, especially considering that the breaks between matches typically last for only minutes. Here, NFC can be used to offer the option for cashless payments — users have to tap their NFC-enabled smart cards on payment readers and be on their way back to watch the match before they even realize it.
3. Improved experience at sporting events: A sporting event means a massive queue and let’s be honest, nobody likes to wait in a line. It can take a toll on their overall experience at the event. To help with this issue, one can use NFC-enabled smart card-based tickets that the user needs to either swipe or tap to gain entry into the venue. Another option is to use mobile tickets, which, again, can be used via tapping or scanned to gain entry. With the time-consuming process of physically inspecting paper tickets eliminated, the process moves along far more quickly and smoothly.
As the above discussion show, the NFC technology presents immense potential, especially for the sports industry. With resources such as NFC-enabled smart cards, NFC payment apps, and more enabling better experiences, quicker payments, and seamless access to a treasure trove of data among other things, there’s just no telling how dramatically and speedily a company in this sector can improve its business.
