The Impact of Live Streaming on Betting Trends

Starting with streaming technology, there is now a different way for sports fans to watch and cheer up for their favorite team or player. Gambling has been made accessible by the government for a clear reason that more markets open up than ever before to a greater audience for a sporting event and changes what types of matches can be watched online.

Live streaming allows for micro-bets on things such as the corners taken in a game or the number of red cards shown.

Real-time betting

But what used to be a remote experience, with puntmakers determining spreads and odds, has been replaced by real-time, event-by-event streaming and microbetting. Bookmakers now provide bettors with a new form of depth in their betting experience, bringing them closer to the real-time action, with ever more opportunities for the bettors who can ride the highs and lows.

Bettors now and/or in the future, young and old, fans of North American and global sports, give the highest value of all features to live streaming (table 4). Live streaming appeals most strongly to young bettors – 18-24 year-old bettors are 69 per cent more likely to use an app with live streaming than all other age cohorts.

Live betting, or in-play betting, has been growing fast in the sportsbook segment because more and more bettors are placing their bets while games are played. Bettors love to place these types of short-term bets, such as bets on goals or set scores, as mobile devices and sportsbooks allow for live streaming with instantaneous access to massive amounts of data and analytics including live odds.

Mobile-first experience

This enables sportsbook operators to gamify streaming, while allowing fans to bet live and in real-time. The environment becomes even more valuable to media companies and rightsholders, who can keep the audience glued to the screen and make the ads more relevant on air, with on-screen graphics showcasing sponsors, among other enhancements.

Live streaming enables sportsbooks to broaden the variety of obscure sporting events to bet on, extending their customer base as well as revenue generation.

Nearly two-thirds of all the US bettors surveyed in our US Bettor Research 2024 ranked it among their top three most important differentiators in picking their sportsbook. Live streaming is even more important to younger bettors: 69 per cent of bettors aged 25-44 say it’s ‘important when choosing a sportsbook’, and 25 per cent of those aged 45-54 and 3 in 10 of those over 55+ tell us they are ‘very interested’ in this feature.

Interactive content

Getting prospects and customersmeaningfully and effortlessly engaged with content is a perfect path to intuitively guiding them toward conversion – but if we want to make their journey compelling and satisfying, we have to understand their needs and motivations – and the best way of doing that is with Interactive Experiences.

Interactive content is a different to media than the lead static content in the sense that it requires a user action and reaction. Media is consumed actively rather than passively when it is interactive and therefore, as a response of that reaction, it delivers much more personalized and dynamic results. Examples of interactive material include calculators, quizzes, polls, ebooks, videos or infographics.

The live streaming feature also contributes to an enjoyable betting experience as well as a feeling that betters interact directly in real time with fellow fans and players, which helps them learn new strategies and tips to improve their experience, while also increasing credibility of sports betting platforms as a community among betters that continue to place bets to improve revenues as well as overall brand engagement.

Enhanced engagement

And live streaming gives those viewers more depth of engagement and more bonding to the presenter. Finally, sports organisations can use live streaming to provide extra content that people can’t get elsewhere – say, a walk-through of the tunnel to the locker room before the game starts or exclusive access that re-enforces fans’ bond to their brand.

For bettors, integrating live streams onto online betting sites greatly widens their appeal to a younger audience who are mobile-first users, especially younger bettors who start researching in betting apps. Because they can watch it on the same screen where they’re betting, they have immediate access to data that will guide them in making quicker decisions.

The growth of microbetting has also experienced a spike with live streaming and ‘in-play’ wagering, meaning that sports bettors have the ability to dynamically exploit data analytics and make a split-second decision, subsequently increasing the probability of making informed wagers. In any case, appreciate alert and responsible gambling interventions, as microbetting can be seen as addictive in nature.