I’m always a bit melancholy after the end of the college football season. That calendar is ingrained in this former beat writer. I'm already plotting out games I’ll try to hit next season -- and pitching my wife on an Idaho trip to watch Appalachian State-Boise State in September.
This week, we check in with two tech companies trying to help fans speed through lines with little-to-no friction. And we start with a look at the home venue of the newly minted college football national champions, Ohio State.
Ohio State uses WaitTime for both internal operations and updates for fans on concessions and restroom lines WaitTime
Evan Derr, the director/event services for Ohio State athletics, can easily explain the long lines for Buckeyes home games in the fall.
“It’s just the sheer number of people,” Derr said of the venue with a capacity of 102,780. “What makes Ohio Stadium unique in being [in the] top-five largest stadiums in the world with capacity is that we got a lot of people to put through a bathroom and to feed and hydrate.”
To better combat the service stagnation, the school has worked with crowd intelligence provider WaitTime for the last two seasons. Founded in 2014, WaitTime uses AI and a host of cameras to analyze lines around concessions and bathrooms in real-time. By producing color-coded indicators via a dashboard of the venue's food and bathroom options, fans can avoid long lines and hit the less-busy spots with a quick glance at their phone.
OSU started using WaitTime’s operation-side offering in 2023 for internal monitoring, and it decided this season to incorporate the fan-facing version of the platform into the official Buckeyes app. Outside a brief messaging earlier this season, Derr said that fans discovered the feature either through word-of-mouth or with the assistance of ushers or event staff. Still, the dashboard registered thousands of visits, and postgame fan surveys yielded satisfied marks with those who used WaitTime.
Zack Klima, the CEO and founder of WaitTime, says that Ohio Stadium is the company's largest rollout. Roughly 100 cameras are positioned around the venue's various options. WaitTime is powered by Intel and distributed worldwide by Wesco. Ohio Electric Services handled the installation at Ohio Stadium in 2023. The rollout in total, Klima estimated, took four-to-six weeks from analysis to setup.
“If you can hang a camera, you can install WaitTime,” Klima said.
Stall tactics
The company has about 30 sports clients worldwide, such as the Heat, Pistons and 49ers. Jim Null, OSU's senior associate AD and CIO, said that WaitTime’s camera-agnostic approach made it easier for the state-funded school to find cameras through their government purchasing contracts.
After considering WaitTime for years, Null shared that the venue became better set up to support the tech in 2019, when the stadium received a Wi-Fi upgrade. The project created nearly 1,700 access points, resulting in more networking wiring closets that help run power via ethernet to the cameras. “That was kind of a barrier prior to that,” Null added.
Klima said that OSU has been measured in the deployment, using 2023 as a first phase to learn from the data. Derr said OSU found a need for more point-of-sale options at some concessions locations after observing long pickup times for food. He also joked about the development of a “people-per-potty" metric, which helped calculate bathroom activity to bolster housekeeping response for cleaner restrooms.
OSU is hopeful that WaitTime capabilities can connect to other parts of their tech operations going forward. A vision of the future, which Derr described as a still-budding idea, is integrating WaitTime into OSU's facility management tool from 24/7 Software. That way, when bathrooms receive 1,000 visitors, it could ping for a housekeeping dispatch.
For next season, Derr said the game plan will focus on educating fans about WaitTime. He also hopes to put it in front of fans more frequently, empowering the larger collective’s decision-making around concession and bathroom trips for Ohio Stadium, which opened in 1922.
“Most college stadiums are old -- very old -- and we’re lucky if they’ve gone through a couple major renovations even in 100 years' time,” Derr said. “That’s kind of how we approached the idea of using WaitTime. How can we improve that experience for fans and educate them a little bit more?”
Ohio State integrated WaitTime into the Buckeyes' app to help fans monitor lines WaitTime
The Marlins are one of the almost 150 teams using Mashgin self-check kiosks at their venues Mashgin
Self-checkout system provider Mashgin has built out a presence in professional sports venues. The company, which utilizes AI and computer vision in their kiosks, is now in almost 150 sports venues that span from collegiate stadiums to the minor and major leagues.
Recently, Mashgin announced a continuation of that growth in 2024, seeing 24 new venues join as clients. For context, less than two years ago, it was in approximately 40 venues.
Mashgin also created a significant impact on patrons, according to a report the company shared with SBJ about the NFL fan experience. Sixteen NFL stadiums produced more than 1.4 million items sold through Mashgin kiosks during the 2024 regular season, totaling $14.6 million in sales with an average purchase price of $23 per transaction. The best part? The median transaction time was less than 15 seconds.
Brandon Scott, VP/sales, sees Mashgin’s growth in sports as a testament to the industry -- with teams, leagues, venues and third parties continuing to produce game-day experiences with less friction.
“We’re riding a lot of that wave,” Scott said. “We’ve done a really good job of just listening -- of getting feedback, doing integrations, making sure our solution is not on an island.”
Scott pointed to the amount of time saved by NFL fans during the 2024 regular season -- a total of 6.3 million minutes, comparing Mashgin transaction time to the 13-minute average time spent by fans at food stands, cited by space utilization platform InnerSpace -- as a clear indicator of impact. The company estimates that a fan taking two concessions trips can miss 23 plays (which could mean potentially three scoring drives), which across a nine-game home slate could equate to potentially 27 missed scoring drives during a season.
But real-world consequences are what really resonate with Scott. He pointed to the thoughts of a recent college administrator as a clear example. “The feedback I got from the client -- it's a big Power Four school -- wasn't revenue. The first thing they said when they began that call was, ‘The fire marshal has stopped yelling at me.’”
Some key wins for Mashgin in 2024 included expansions in college venues like Texas and Auburn as well as rolling out more than 60 units at the Bears’ Soldier Field. The company has also been part of the growing innovation around LAFC’s BMO Stadium, which my SBJ colleague Bret McCormick wrote about at the end of last year regarding the all-around benefits of mobile driver’s license.
For 2025, Scott says that Mashgin is hopeful to roll out some new products that will fit in “different parts of the stadium, different service styles” during the back end of the calendar year. He also wants to continue Mashgin’s international traction, saying that the company has circled around Europe and the U.K. without a direct push there yet. With a large presence already established throughout the U.S., Scott still sees opportunities for kiosk expansion in venues it's already occupying. “Seeing more of them [in use], and potentially having an entire stadium [using] Mashgin would be at the top of my wish list,” Scott said.
The X Games is enlisting Google Cloud for AI judging around the Superpipe competition in this week’s X Games Aspen 2025. Vertex AI and other tools in the Google Cloud suite will analyze the runs of competitors to produce airtime, trick execution and difficulty metrics.
Tennis Australia completed its first close for AO Ventures, a fund dedicated to sports tech startups that are primarily at the seed or Series A phase, reports my SBJ colleague Rob Schaefer. The close totaled $30 million.
Catapult named automated football data management provider ANSRS as a preferred partner, writes my SBJ colleague Joe Lemire, integrating its AI tools into the Thunder Cloud video platform used by more than 90% of NCAA D-I programs.
This week's Facilities newsletter features SBJ's Bret McCormick covering how Cosm is becoming an in-demand part of mixed-use sports development projects.
