SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
The industry once again stands poised to take in a wave of fresh products and innovations in the English capital, with Stats Perform one such company that is looking to continue creating “memorable betting experiences” as a trifecta of sporting showpieces loom on the horizon.
Self confessed to be “exceptionally excited” about the week that lies ahead, the group is prepared to introduce the industry to a number of product enhancements to raise the bar further still.
Ahead of the industry descent on London, and with Euro 2024, Copa America and the Olympics, in mind, Head of Betting Product Nick Cockerill elaborates, in detail, on what is set to be introduced by Stats Perform, and how these will drive more confident trading and crucially heighten the entertainment factor for players.
SBC: Many operators large and small have adopted the innovative new features of the Stats Perform live streaming service in the last 12 months. What are you introducing at ICE London this year?
Nick Cockerill: Bet LiveStreams is such a fun product to work on, even more so since we started combining our deep live stats and metrics with our amazing portfolio of exclusive live match video rights, tailoring it for bettors via Smart Stats Overlays and Instant Highlights.
We’ve seen a phenomenal uptake from our sportsbook partners for those new features, and a similar response from their bettors, but we wanted to take Bet LiveStreams even further for 2024! And so at ICE we are aiming to wow the sports betting industry again by showing off not one, but two major streaming video upgrades.
First, Smarts Stats Overlays becomes Interactive Smart Stats Overlays.
We’ve evolved it from a triggered, passive experience into a fully interactive live streaming experience for bettors. This means clickable, tailored Opta match, team and player stats that can be called at any time over the stream, with broadcast-calibre graphics and betting insights, plus a contextual market and odds, and the ability to place a bet, all from inside the stream!
Interactive Smart Stats Overlays is a really cool, immersive viewing experience that aligns our insights friction-free next to appropriate betting opportunities, creating a 360 degree watch and bet experience. It is tailor-made for enriching and informing popular experiences like player stats bets and same-game multis. It brings together multiple layers of the Stats Perform media and content engine into one potent package.
To get a hands-on demo and imagine the possibilities for your sportsbook, come and see us at ICE!
SBC: Combining your live streams with insights, interactivity and betting does sound like a potent package for bettors. What is the next new streaming feature you’re showcasing?
NC: Our next live streaming feature we’ll be launching at ICE is Instant Highlights Playlists.
This takes the roaring success of our ‘single game’ Instant Highlights product and expands it to cover highlights and replays from multiple games into one carousel.
It’s tailor-made for the modern generation of sports bettors and also for popular modern bet types like multis and in-play. Instant Highlight Playlists will allow your customers viewing Stats Perform’s Bet LiveStreams service to curate a playlist of highlights from multiple live games across different leagues into an easy-to-watch, real-time playlist, so they don’t miss any of the action.
This could be all the goals, or all the highlights from Serie A matches that are live right now, and the highlights from many of the other leagues in our Bet LiveStreams portfolio that are also underway.
It means customers can follow and see the action across multiple live games at the same time, to multiply the entertainment!
It’s a really brilliant, action-packed experience for sports bettors who have placed multi-bets, or want to identify new in-play betting opportunities across various live games.
There’s a huge amount of behind-the-scenes smarts and data – and of course it leverages our enormous exclusive live streaming portfolio, and the user experience is really slick. We think it’ll be a huge hit.
SBC: Stats Perform have also promised to unveil a wave of fresh proprietary markets to your Opta Betting product. Could you tell us a little more about this?
NC: 2023 was another year of expansion for our multi-award winning Opta Betting product, and we’re really proud of how widely it’s been embraced by our customers and their bettors across both men’s and women’s competitions.
The number of sportsbooks internationally offering Opta-powered player and team stats markets more than doubled, and so did our game coverage, expanding to over 7,000+ matches and 50+ international competitions. This means more countries can offer trusted player stats markets for their local elite men’s and women’s competitions.
Now we’re enabling sportsbooks to offer markets based on an even wider variety of the accurate and deep data points that we collect during a live game, to help create greater interest in the game and to unlock even richer game-long entertainment.
The first new market isn’t technically a data point, however. It’s a new, transparent, fantasy-style rating system we’ve developed to help score a player’s influence within a game, based on their performance.
We think both trading and marketing teams will get really creative with the new player ratings betting options, particularly for the EURO 2024 tournament.
On the surface, the Opta Player Ratings scoring mechanism looks simple and that’s because it is. It’s easily understood and the scoring mechanic behind it means that different positions on the field are represented accordingly.
This means that every player on the pitch has value, and this will help trading teams create a wide variety of markets at an individual player, combined or team-level.
We think betting on Opta Player Ratings will be a big hit with customers. It taps into prop-betting behaviours, brings all players into consideration, is game-long and will add many more storylines for your marketing and content teams to promote your sportsbook.
SBC: What does Stats Perform’s recent affordability partnership with Equifax mean for licensed sports betting, slots, casino and bingo operators?
NC: The new affordability product developed by Equifax will help ensure that operators have the information they need to help protect consumers, deliver quicker decisions and offer better customer experiences.
We have a long history of using technology to help the businesses of sport be more entertaining, more accessible and more trusted. This new partnership is complementary to that objective and will remove a lot of the friction, manual checks and resourcing that is in use today.
SBC: What else can we expect from Stats Perform in 2024?
NC: Come and see us on stand S1-240 at ICE for the full list! A few more highlights:
- Euro 2024, Copa America, The Olympics. Three major events to look forward to this summer, and it’s unlikely an exaggeration that whatever your ideas or plans around these showpiece events, we’ll be able to help you unlock some extra magic and performance.
- Our powerful tool to create automated visual content, PressBox Graphics, is now even more usable. We’ve added pre-game and in-play odds, enhanced our out-of-home screen feature, and added even more of our content that spans 15+ sports into the platform.
- The Content Player Pro has also been upgraded to include Momentum and xG Race Charts to provide even greater at-a-glance usability and betting connection. Our unique Same Game Multi Assistant is now also available at a team-level, not just player-level. It makes finding in-form teams and players for SGM effortless and I encourage you to have a go yourself.
- And so much more! We can’t wait to reveal everything and are looking forward to meeting all our partners, old and new.
P.s. as a reward for reading this far – here’s an exclusive peek at our Euro 2024 preview pack. You’ll be able to pick up a physical copy too at S1-240. See you there!
