LOS ANGELES (AP) — AEG, the sports and entertainment giant that is up for sale, is making it easier to book concert and sports tickets for friends without having to pay for them all at once. The owner of Staples Center and the National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings is rolling out the feature, called AXS Invite, at some of its owned and operated venues starting this month.

The service allows ticket buyers to pay for their own seats and then reserve several adjacent ones online. The purchaser then invites friends through Facebook or email, and the friends have 48 hours to accept or decline the invitation. They in turn register on the site and pay for the tickets themselves. Unsold tickets will go back up for sale.

AXS Invite won't be available immediately when tickets are first put on sale, which means it probably won't be useful for quickly sold-out shows. Andrus said the feature could be available within hours or the next day, but certainly within 48 hours of a given sale time.

AEG launched its ticketing arm, AXS, about a year ago and has so far changed 18 of its approximately 100 owned and operated venues over to AXS from ticketing competitor Ticketmaster. AEG won the right to use Ticketmaster's platform as a condition for getting government clearance of the combination of Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment Inc. in 2010. But it still has to pay fees to use it. Changing venues to its own AXS platform saves on these fees, and also gives AEG a closer relationship with its customers.

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