iGB Live panel: The importance of real-time data in sports streaming
Earlier this year, we reported on FanDuel’s partnership with Are You Watching This?! for real-time sports alerts. Now that little phrase tells you everything. These little parcels of information delivered at rapid speed epitomise how casual viewers and bettors engage with sporting events across the world nowadays. Gone are the times of only watching your local football team and no longer do we rely on the morning papers to find out who won the European Cup the night before. Calls for an end to the 3pm blackout on Premier League games increase because punters struggle to contextualise the idea of not being able to watch the sport they want to watch, wherever they are.
People want to watch the Super Bowl, they want the Aussie Rules and see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to bet on horseracing in Mongolia just as easily as they can the FA Cup Final. Crucially, they want to know what’s going on in real time. Or as close as.
Speed for speed’s sake is not the sole focus of Bart Snoeks’ talk at the Pulse Theatre, but slicing an extra second off your latency is big business in the world of sports betting. So, providers have to hop to it. Snoeks is the Tech Sales Lead at Dolby OptiView, the tech giant’s live streaming solution. In horse and greyhound racing, as Snoeks explains, speed is still king.
It’s very easy for a betting operator to quantify the losses that bad latency is costing it. They can see clearly see the well-meaning flutters coming in as players follow a stream that’s 10 seconds out of sync. In reality, the race is run and those bets will now be rendered invalid. The operator can do nothing but watch those stakes flutter away.
One use case Snoeks cited involved an operator covering some horseracing thousands of miles away. It was working with a latency of 12 seconds until Dolby reduced that to one. Overnight, revenue rose over 20%, according to Snoeks, as those wagers previously lost in betting window purgatory became valid.
But even overlooking that immediate gratification (and why would you?), Snoeks is convinced the Dolby OptiView technology represents a worthwhile investment. To his point, the watch-time statistics he provides bear that out. The same company experienced a 29% increase on that metric after switching to Dolby, indicating that when players compare sites and see that one is further ahead than another, they’re likely going to stick around a bit longer than with a laggier platform.
That treasured low latency is a boon for security, too. With faster and better controlled streams, the betting window can be eased open at the same time the door is shut on bad actors.
“So DRM is encrypting your content, decrypting it on the player side, making sure that it doesn’t get stolen on the way. In the cloud, we are one of the only solutions out there that can do this at low latency, and make sure your content is encrypted and decrypted without being stolen in the middle.”
Dolby is a storied innovator in sound and vision, but in sports betting, data is just as vital a component. In the battle for eyes and bets, especially on sports like football, data prevails. It sounds off-trend, but does that mean pure latency speed capabilities take a back seat?
“When we talk about latency for sports betting, most of our competitors say: ‘As fast as possible, that’s what’s needed.’ We do not agree with that.”
‘No secondary streams’ is a drum Snoeks beats repeatedly and, in practice, that can mean slowing the visual stream slightly to synchronise it with the data. Because: “What sense does it make if a viewer is watching data streams on a secondary device, because it’s faster than a video stream?”
In-play betting can’t be ignored as an opportunity for operators. Syncing data in an assured, intuitive way that gives the player the most encouragement and licence to make informed in-play bets is only going to boost revenue.
But data goes both ways, and as well as keeping track of the score, Dolby wants to know what and when people are watching. Where are they when they bet, and on what device? The more user data Dolby can process and roll out to clients, the more those operators are going to be able to refine their offering.
Achieving the level of consistency and technical smoothness that Dolby needs for all this is not without its challenges. For the protocols to scale out, it has to be able to optimise under sub-optimal technical conditions. Look at Brazil, perhaps the most talked-about emerging market of the moment, Dolby has no choice but to be light on its feet as the streaming traffic intensifies.
“To cope with that, you can’t come up with a tier-three or tier-two solution. You need to have a steady cloud solution, tier one, and also with decent ISP connectivity, because in the end, your data centre can be great, but your traffic to the end user using the local ISP connectivity needs to be assured as well.”
Showing adaptability and an ability to localise the approach to building up your tech infrastructure in every region gives Dolby the tools to flatten out its offering; ensuring that both users and operators are getting a fair crack of the whip, wherever they are. “We should have one experience. For me that’s not only in sports betting, but also in regular streaming.”
Gathering around the screen at the local bookies may be a more obsolete way to bet on sports than it used to be, but innovating land-based channels is still on the agenda for Dolby. “We have a technology whereby we can stream multiple games and see them simultaneously. That could be one game with multiple camera angles, but for betting use cases, that could also be a multi-game live stream.”
The traditional betting shop can be hamstrung by a limited number of screens, which often may be insufficient to show all the streams the shop has the rights to. With Dolby OptiView, Snoeks proudly tells us how a player can select exactly which stream they want to watch and bet on from an interactive preview display.
One concern might be the quality of these streams, not in terms of speed, but resolution. Broadcast rights often have stipulations on what kind of bit-rate the stream can be run at. Dolby certainly wouldn’t want a grainy stream tarring its reputation and has instead found a solution using AI to improve the quality of the stream while keeping the resolution itself the same. A neat workaround that doesn’t jeopardise the broadcast agreement.
Sports betting is a huge market and one sport is not like the other, but Snoeks’ exposition of Dolby OptiView’s capabilities might be a vision of the future, arriving in real-time.
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