Sports Betting & Live Streaming - The Next Big Thing?
In the sports industry, a little revolution is slowly going on. In only 4 years, streaming giants such as Amazon stripped broadcasting rights from pay-TV for huge events such as the NFL (2018), Roland Garros (2019), and more recently the Ligue 1 (2021). Now, the challenge is to attract and keep their viewers. Hopefully, a great feature seems to be perfectly adapted to their needs: betting.
Sports Betting, From Ancient Greece to Modern World
Let’s start with a bit of history. From the birth of the sport, there have always been bettings. In ancient Greece, sponsiones were placed on Chariot Races, while in ancient Rome, Romans could bet on gladiator battles. Some centuries later, in the 16th and 17th centuries, horse betting became very popular in the UK and was firstly reserved for the aristocracy. Then, while it became more and more popular, innkeepers and pub owners became the major promoters and naturally the first bookmakers.
In 1845, with the adoption of the Gambling Act, the British government banned gambling in pubs, which led to the opening of betting shops, as you could watch in the Netflix show Peaky Blinders.
In 1857, in France, was introduced the “pari mutuel”. The principle? Despite registering each bet individually, the bettors play against each other and share the winnings. This principle of mutualization was also introduced in the UK through “pools”, where players could choose to bet on more than 10 football matches for the coming weekend in the “Treble Chance”. After WW2, this pool was incremented with the famous 1X2 formula, where players must predict whether the home team will win (1), lose (2) or draw (X).
And then, in 1995, the first website was created. This shook up the industry and broke all the boundaries thanks to three factors :
1- The development of gaming software in the mid-1970s, caused the replacement of traditional coin-operated slot machines by casinos
2- The development of the Internet in the early 1990s, allowed several computers to be linked through a server and thus share gaming applications
3- The recognition of a regulatory framework in 1994, played a central role in the development of online gaming
Although sports betting was popular before the Internet, this practice was far from being as widespread as it is today. These days, players can bet anytime, anywhere, and almost in any competition. The 1X2 formula is now among the very large range of derived odds, such as bets on the exact score, the winner at half-time, or the scorers.
Live betting, the game-changer
But the most significant development was the introduction in 2002 of live betting. This new feature offered the possibility for players to bet during the game. As the game is evolving, “traders” from sports betting sites re-evaluate the odds to reflect the changing nature of the game.
As a personal example, I was recently watching a tennis game from Nadal in the 1/32 of the Indian Wells ATP. Before the match, the odds for Nadal's winner were at 1/10. When I turned the game on, Nadal was losing 5–2 in the last set. At this moment, the odds were at 5/1. That means that depending on the moment I would have placed a €100 bet, I would have either won €10, or 500€. Small difference, isn’t it?
Live betting offered a new dimension to the sports viewing experience, and the sports betting website has clearly understood it. In France, live betting represented 32% of the total amount of the T2 2021 bets. In some sports, such as volleyball, 70% of the bets were taken live. And this number is likely to increase with the development of mobile apps and 5G.
What’s next?
With the online revolution, sports betting companies learned two key insights:
1- Players are willing to bet while watching a game.
2- The fact of betting gives an extra value to the games they watch
Then, it is a no-brainer to think that the next big thing will be a better embedding of live streaming inside the betting website. Or would it be the opposite: a better embedding of betting in the live streaming website?
Online bookmakers already took the fold to enrich their websites from live streaming services. Going back to my previous example of Rafael Nadal, I watched part of the game on Winamax TV. But these companies face huge regulations from broadcasters: no full screen, no HD, no possibility to cast it on TV… As a result, very few people spend an hour and a half watching the game. Live streaming appears only as a way to increase the number of bets, but not really to live the kind of experience described above.
On the other front, streaming companies are slowly moving into live betting to answer consumers' needs. Bob Chapek, CEO of Disney, stated betting is something Disney is “keenly interested in and is pursuing aggressively”, through its ESPN network. According to him, this additional feature would “make (their) product even more engaging that is now”. No doubt that if Disney, a family-based company at first glance very far from betting, is taking the bet, the odds must be interesting.
“We do believe that sports betting is a very significant opportunity for the company. And as we follow the consumer, we necessarily have to seriously consider getting into gambling in a bigger and bigger way. And ESPN is a perfect platform for this.”, Bob Chapek, Chief Executive Officer of Disney
Yet, one question remains. Who will take the prize if both parties are trying to get the same thing? Will the traditional sports betting website prevail over streaming giants? The key point is that the battle will more likely be against institutions. It will be to who will manage to have what he wishes in first: the license to provide betting service for the ones, the agreement to provide better streaming content for the others. Stay tuned, everything is still in play.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
