SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
It’s just over a year since Stats Perform released a variety of new products for sports betting operators and affiliates, in a blockbuster product launch they called Light Up Your Sportsbook.
“In Light Up Your Sportsbook we wanted to show operators new ways to use live streaming to attract, retain and engage new users, and to delight existing ones with new experiences ” said Stats Perform’s VP of Betting Product, Nick Cockerill. SBC News caught up with Nick to review the impact of these products on the sports betting industry and how they’re not stopping there
We’ve changed the appeal of live streaming in sports betting
When we launched Instant Highlights and Smart Stats Overlays™ in March 2022, we knew we were taking something that hadn’t really changed since it first launched 10+ years ago and fundamentally evolving how customers consumed and interacted with it. For the first time, customers weren’t just watching a stream, they were interacting with it and that principle of transforming passive content experiences into ones that are actively engaging for more users is one we’ll be focusing on in the coming years.
Instant Highlights has undoubtedly been the star of the show and the rate at which new clients have integrated the product has been quite staggering given how congested we know roadmaps can be. This has been massively validating to us and gives us confidence to accelerate our plans for what’s next – which I’m even more excited about than when we first launched!
One of the use cases we’re most pleased with is what Superbet have done, integrating the Instant Highlights API with their push notifications service. Their service now triggers highlight notifications for users to see replays of the most important action for an event they’ve bet on. The open rate has been excellent, and this is exactly the sort of ‘re-engagement’ we were hoping for when we built the product.
We’ve also seen bet365 add streaming highlights into match event timelines, making live video more visible and more easily discovered by their customers, seamlessly integrated into their core user experience.
Outside of highlights, several operators are also displaying our Smart Stats Overlays™ over the top of their Stats Perform powered streams, which user research has told us is helping bettors make faster, more confident in-play decisions.
But numbers talk loudest, and the impact of these features has been significant even in the short few months since the first operator went live. For example, from February 2022 (pre-these features) to February 2023, we’ve seen:
⦁ One partner has increased the number of average unique users per live stream for football by an average of 20% year on year.
⦁ One partner has seen tier-2 property unique users per stream grow by more than 67%.
⦁ One partner who is using our Smart Stats Overlays feature has increased the average session duration by over 50%.
These numbers are terrific and worth repeating. We’re thrilled we’ve been able to help our customers unlock new growth from live streaming by rethinking the way live video is delivered, to make it appealing for today’s bettor.
I’m particularly pleased that the results show more bettors are engaging with more streams; not just the flagship LaLiga, Ligue 1 and Serie A, but also fantastic matches from across the rest of the world that might have otherwise gone unwatched, in fact we’ve seen highlights played from over 40 competitions, in more than 100 territories and in 18 different languages and that’s just soccer – with operators now actively integrating these same products for tennis as well.
We see Smart Stats Overlays™ having a big 2023, because of the role it plays in making live streaming more valuable for more bettors. It provides betting-specific overlays over the top of the stream including data-driven betting insights, team expected goals, fouls, corners and offsides information. One user from our research group spoke to the betting specific nature of these graphics directly:
“This is great – because it’s information you don’t really see in one place like this anywhere else”
This helps seasoned bettors, but also helps attract new customers to leagues and competitions they might have been so familiar with.
We’ve recently undertook a huge design and display upgrade to our entire overlays suite – with the aim of bringing broadcast quality visuals and animations to the sports betting experience. From extensive user testing, all signs are that we’ve achieved this ambition and the feedback from operators has been brilliant.
We’re rolling this out over the next month into our hosted product (including into our brand-new Content Player Pro) – so it won’t be long before your customers can start using them and getting value. For a closer look at these, check out our Smart Stats Overlays™ look book.
Smart Stats Overlays™ for tennis include live betting insights like this one, as well as momentum trackers and a live win probability metric built by our internal data scientists from our enormous tennis dataset:
In football the overlays show betting insights throughout the game as well as Opta stats to support prop bets like shots, passes and tackles, and live Opta xG (expected goals) to help bettors quickly see the score behind the scoreboard.
If operators use our hosted Content Player Pro, there is no further integration work to access Instant Highlights and Smart Stats Overlays™. They can also build from our APIs to create custom experiences. They’re such powerful tools and we’re delighted with the growth they’ve delivered for live streaming and bettor engagement, in such a short time.
Stay tuned for part 2 of our interview with Nick Cockerill where he covers three other areas Stats Perform are helping sportsbooks and affiliates ‘light up’ sports betting in 2023: same-game multis, live game visualisations and content discovery.
