The recently launched Redbox Instant streaming service isn’t the only thing Redbox is doing to expand its business beyond physical DVD and video game rentals.

Yesterday, the Coinstar-owned company began offering customers in Los Angeles the capability to purchase tickets to sporting events, standup comedy shows, theme parks, night clubs, concerts, and more through its new Redbox Tickets service.

The ticketing service, which was first tested with a select number of events in Philadelphia last year, is available on both Redbox’s website as well as the 1,300 DVD and game rental kiosks in the area. Buyers can then either print off their tickets at home or pick them up at the event box office before the show.

But here’s why you should care about Redbox Tickets: It’s charging a $1 flat fee for processing, which is much lower than what other services tack on to the original ticket price.

The only downside is you likely won’t have a selection of premium seating to choose from. Venues that provide Redbox with tickets will be doing so to minimize the number of unsold tickets prior to an event, the company told the Wall Street Journal back in October.

In other words, people who are planning to buy tickets at top dollar as soon as they go on sale will get first crack at tickets like normal, along with the higher processing fee. Whatever is left will then become available through Redbox, which isn’t a bad deal when you consider that less desirable seats will now cost less.

Initially, Redbox is offering venue tickets from Caesars Entertainment, Improv Comedy Clubs, NASCAR/ISC at Auto Club Speedway, Universal Studios Hollywood theme park, Guinness World Record Museum, and Playhouse Nightclub. To do this, Redbox made agreements with five existing ticketing services, including Agile Ticketing, Paciolan, ShoWare, Ticketfly and TicketMob. My guess is that Redbox will add to that list of partnerships in the future and eventually roll out its ticketing service to more cities.

Despite charging just a $1 fee on ticket sales, Redbox will still probably bring in enough business to make it worthwhile. This is partially because selling tickets isn’t much different from selling DVD/game rentals, at least from a consumer perspective. Tickets are now just one more thing you can get through Redbox, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing those Redbox kiosks pop up near concert venues, stadiums, and night clubs.

Dave Morin, CEO of social-network Path, has joined ticketing startup Eventbrite‘s board of the directors, a move Eventbrite claims will help it continue innovating on the social front.

While Path had a major privacy blowup early this year, the company has carried on with its head high by raising a new $30 million funding round. Eventbrite doesn’t talk about Path much in their announcement, however, and instead lauds Morin’s role as a former head of Facebook’s platform group.

“Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz said, in a statement. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees. We are thrilled to welcome Dave to our board and believe his expertise and guidance will be an incredible asset to Eventbrite as we continue to grow.”

Eventbrite is arguably the hottest startup today with an emphasis on ticketing and events. In February, the company said it had issued more than 50 million tickets and today the company says it has issued nearly 60 million tickets. Eventbrite also recently launched its first hardware product with an “at the door” credit card reader.

“Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities,” Morin said, in a statement. “I’ve been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events.”

Morin joins former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy, former Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty, Sequoia Capital Partner Roelof Botha, and others on Eventbrite’s board.

Dave Morin photo: Flickr/Joi Ito

Ticketfly partnered with technology providers Aloompa and Intellitix to make event management smoother at venues, with radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication of tickets and passes, ticket scanning, and box office tools, all of which are available on Android devices and the iPhone.

For attendees, Ticketfly partnered with car sharing service Zimride to help concert-goers find carpools to events right after they have purchased tickets online. Ticketfly is an enterprise technology provider focused on providing end-to-end solutions for music promoters and venues, such as ticketing solutions, email and social marketing tools and analytics.

“Events are inherently social, and we love to facilitate the community-building component,” Ticketfly co-founder Andrew Dreskin told VentureBeat. ”Music festivals are a very interesting and exciting part of the live event landscape in the U.S. You can never pirate the live experience, so people continue to go to music events.”

Dreskin says live festivals have come to the forefront of the music industry in the U.S. with events like the Ultra Music Festival, Bumbershoot and the Treasure Island Music Festival drawing crowds both regionally and nationally. Sometimes crowds come from even further afield.

By partnering with Zimride, Ticketfly is expanding access to events and helping attendees reduce their environmental impact at the same time. ”The ability to marry Zimride’s ridesharing solution with Ticketfly will save fans and venues millions of dollars on transportation costs while creating a new community for fans to meet before and after the show,” said Logan Green, founder and chief executive officer of Zimride in a statement.

Winter is a slow time for the music festivals, so launching its new integrated product now may give Ticketfly and partners a chance to stomp out any bugs before the festival season ramps up again. In April, Coachella will kick off the music festival season followed by Bonnaroo, Sasquatch, Outside Lands and many more. These major music festivals of the spring and summer will allow Ticketfly and its tech collaborators to see how well their technology has worked together. Some Ticketfly partners are currently providing services to festival organizers such for Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, while Ticketfly certainly hopes to do so with its integrated offering.

The fees paid for purchasing tickets represent a $10 billion opportunity, says Dreskin. The face value of all tickets sold worldwide is more than $50 billion. “That’s pretty juicy,” says Dreskin.

Ticketfly is based in San Francisco, and has raised $15 million in funding. The company has 70 employees and has been generating revenue for the past 30 months, said Dreskin.

Image via Christian Holmer/Flickr