Tech Focus: Sportsbooks, Part 1 - Broadcast Sports but Bigger, Brighter, Louder A legal quirk allows casinos to make a big bet on broadcast sports By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Wednesday, September 20, 2023 - 7:00 am
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You can go to one game, or you can go to many games. That's how Josh Francois, managing director, spectaculars, Daktronics, views the casino-sportsbook landscape today. After a 2018 Supreme Court ruling allowed individual states to determine their own sports-gambling regulations, the sector - once characterized by smoky backrooms at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, with 4:3 CRT displays showing second-string horse races - has become a turbocharged sports experience. Giant 4K displays take scaled-up global feeds of broadcast sports on a 24/7 basis.
Daktronics' Josh Francois: It's not a bunch of old guys smoking bad cigars watching the ponies anymore.
It's not a bunch of old guys smoking bad cigars watching the ponies anymore, says Francois, who has watched the sportsbook concept evolve over the past five years from an amenity the hotels had just to keep you on the property to a destination that the manager at Circa Las Vegas [at 70,000 sq. ft., the largest sports book in Las Vegas, with 98 million pixels in displays installed by Daktronics] described as the Disneyland of sports.'
One effect of the court decision on gambling was a jump in activity around casino sportsbooks. Venues saw revenues soar almost immediately: for instance, New Jersey's sportsbooks reported $40.7 million in wagers the first full month after the ruling, nearly triple the previous month's take.
Broadcast Sports Provides the Content That surge in revenue has fueled a wave of renovation in the sportsbook vertical, which relies on broadcast-sports content, particularly that supplied by DirecTV but also from cable and, increasingly, OTT sources.
Sportsbooks currently take the same broadcast feeds sent over on-air networks and cable, scaling them for the venue's larger-than-life ambience. According to Eric Winnicki, senior project manager, McCann Systems - which has built sportsbooks in major-league sports venues, including the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC, and the Caesar's Sportsbook at the MLB Diamondbacks' Chase Field in Phoenix - integrators take a very broadcast-centric 24/7 no-fail approach to the technology. They use switches and scalers from broadcast-standby suppliers like Evertz and take main feeds from sources like DirecTV and backup signals from Comcast and other providers in case weather or other incidents disable the satellite dish.
Fail-Safe Operation AV-systems integration for modern sportsbooks has understandably become more complex, with casino owners and managers looking to accommodate as wide a range of sports as possible and to be able to switch on a dime when multiple events are taking place.
Alpha's Lance Hutchinson: Casino operators want systems that are easy to manage, to accommodate guest requests to see any specific game available.
Casino operators want to make sure that the systems are easy to manage, to accommodate guest requests to see any specific game available the guest may be betting on, explains Lance Hutchinson, VP, Alpha, an integrator whose portfolio includes Harrah's Cherokee Casino Resort in North Carolina and the Coushatta Casino Resort in Kinder, LA. That makes system operation and integration critical. The backend system needs to be able to link in cable and satellite guide data in real time so that operations staff doesn't have to spend time searching for a particular matchup. Our typical solutions allow the operations team to sort games by type - football, soccer, NBA, college - as well as to show what games are live right now. This makes it very easy to allow the programming to be displayed instantly.
A Transition to Streaming Broadcast supplies the core of content, but sports media is rapidly shifting toward streaming. Winnicki speculates that an all-IP content-delivery environment for the largest sportsbooks could be a reality as soon as the start of the 2024 NFL season. And, he warns, that migration could bring disruptive changes to the burgeoning sector: The networking teams at the sportsbooks are going to have make sure their networks are bulletproof, super solid. If the network goes down, it all goes down.
Coherent Design's Kevin Potts: More and more [sportsbooks] realize that the audio is part of what gets the crowd engaged.
Kevin Potts, managing principal, Coherent Design, whose portfolio includes Circa and the Stratosphere Race & Sportsbook in Las Vegas, sees streaming as a largely unexplored technology at this scale, with multiple streams feeding massive HD displays. He estimates that, in some books, it already constitutes as much as 20% of the content but most of that is niche sports, such as Asian soccer matches.
The big challenge with streaming will be managing all the different online services, which will be way different from just having banks of DirecTV boxes, he says. Computers have a tendency to go to sleep, and there are all sorts of issues from different operating systems. It's all stuff we'll have to figure out.
(In fact, an early test of streaming may come this fall in college football. Notre Dame games will be carried on streaming service Peacock instead of linear NBC because of a protracted carriage battle between Nexstar Media Group and DirecTV.)
Timely Betting Data With Graphics As entertainment-centric as these destinations become, the target audience in a sportsbook is still the bettors, and they need data to base their wagers on. Fortunately, even that can be made more engaging.
We typically employ ticker services that supply more-interesting data in the text content t
