Sports fans now have an array of opportunities to place bets on live events, yet only a handful of jurisdictions allow betting terminals in pubs and arcades – is the industry missing out?
Sports betting has been one of the gaming industry’s biggest successes and, as a sector, continues to experience growth on a massive scale.
Few have embraced the internet like sportsbook operators and fewer still have been able to leverage its strengths quite so well. The availability of a seemingly endless stream of televised sporting events and the appetite for placing wagers is sure to see the market continue to expand. Perhaps the greatest innovation, however, has been the marriage between live coverage of events and in-play wagering – you don’t even need to ask for the latest odds during a game, they now appear on the advertising boards around the pitch.
Sports betting, said David Mixa of Czech gaming group Synot, is now more popular than ever. “We think this is due to the cohesion of sport with the latest technologies, especially with the internet and live betting on mobile devices, for example,” he told InterGame. Synot offers a host of sports betting products and services, including internet gaming, self-service betting terminals, over the counter services and mobile applications. “Sport and betting have something in common – excitement from the game and pleasure of winning.”
There has undoubtedly been an explosion in sports betting participation in the wake of the increase in televised sport. This, in tandem with easier access to placing wagers has had a major impact on the trends seen within the sector.
“There is a direct correlation between watching an event and betting in-play,” said Ian Williams, chief commercial officer of UK-based Buzz Sports. “I was recently told by a large bookmaker online that has streaming that over 90 per cent of their in-play volume comes through the games they live stream on. The same would be true of land-based groups.”
Buzz Sports’ ZonePlay is a real-time in-play sports betting product that, using a simple geographical representation of the field of play, offers players the opportunity to bet on the next incident during live sporting events, with live constantly changing odds on whether a corner, free kick or goal will happen, for example. ZonePlay can be integrated in either a retail, online or mobile betting environment.
This article can be read in full in the January issue of InterGame.
