SVG Sit-Down: Genius Sports' Sean Conroy Is Bullish on Betting-Fueled Content Opportunities The commercial director shares the latest on gambling-data tech, new partnership with DraftKings and NFL By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Thursday, August 19, 2021 - 9:54 am
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With sports betting flourishing across the U.S., sports-data and technology companies are honing their offerings and services in an effort to stake their claim as the partner of choice for sports leagues, rightsholders, bookmakers, and more.
Genius Sports' Sean Conroy: The most forward-thinking leagues and federations are harnessing betting to create more-immersive fan experiences.
One company that has risen rapidly in the industry is Genius Sports. The technology, data, video-streaming, and integrity-services provider already boasts a portfolio of more than 170,000 official live sports events per year, thanks to partnerships with the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and, in the UK, the Premier League.
Genius has been active in the news this week with the acquisition of Spirable, a data-driven video-marketing company, and the addition of industry veteran and Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Steve Bornstein as president, North America. The company is also gearing up for the start of the lucrative NFL season with a recently announced deal with popular online sportsbook DraftKings, under which Genius Sports will offer a suite of NFL-related products for the upcoming season.
SVG sat down with Genius Sports Commercial Director Sean Conroy to discuss what the London-based company brings to the table, what's behind its quick rise in sports media, and what he's most excited to see play out in the sports-betting space.
For those in the industry who aren't aware, can you detail Genius Sports' role in the sports-betting ecosystem? And how do your services factor into the live-sports-production sector?
At our core, we're a technology company. We're a specialist in sports technology and software. We sit at the intersection of sports, betting, and media, connecting sports leagues and teams with sportsbooks, broadcasters, media, and streaming companies. We help to connect the entire ecosystem, providing technology layers and data solutions that allow each set of partners across those areas to work together and thrive.
For sports, we work with leagues, federations, and teams to help them collect, package, and distribute their official data and live video content. This is central to how they engage their fans, create efficiencies at an operational level, and ultimately generate revenue and commercialize their content through media and sports betting.
We work alongside sportsbooks to help take the official data and video that we collect in partnership with sports and use that to power everything from split-second odds to outsourced trading solutions, live streams, and more across thousands of events. We effectively help sportsbooks engage their existing customers with engaging content and support the actual provision and delivery of those core betting markets that sit within their platform.
We think less specifically around sports betting and more about how do we engage fans? How do we deliver meaningful content and experiences for fans?
What does it mean to be the official data provider of a sports property, and how do these deals benefit Genius and its customers?
Official sports data is facts and information relating to an event or match that is directly sanctioned and approved by the relevant governing body. Official data deals provide sports with a fair return from betting on their competitions while creating the fastest, most accurate and reliable source of information to power engaging betting and media products.
What's important to know is that each sport or league is different. They have a disparate set of needs and requirements. What we do when we start working with any sport is, we sit down and look to understand how they operate their sport today. What are the tools that they have in place to collect and distribute live data? How do they capture and produce live video content to serve fans?
We then build solutions that allow them to better optimize their current operations. For example, we may work with a league to install a new official live-data scoring system. We may work to implement our cameras to support machine-learning-based optical data-tracking collection. There's a variety of different types of tools and technologies that we use.
Fundamentally, what we are looking to do is provide the right technology to the right league to help them collect and control their official data. Really, no two deals are the same, but the principle is to provide technology, to support the creation of robust and high-quality data and content and serve that to the fans within their ecosystem in a smart way.
Let's look at the NFL. You just announced that you will be working with DraftKings on a suite of products for the upcoming season. What's most exciting about what you can accomplish with a partner like DraftKings?
We are delighted with the long-term strategic partnership with DraftKings. We will be working with one of the U.S.'s premier sportsbook brands to provide them a range of official NFL data, from the core data and information required to run the betting markets to next-gen stats (which is the rich feed of information collected and produced from the players to track ball speeds and player speeds). We're taking all of this data and working with DraftKings to drive and innovate that experience for bettors around the NFL.
Our vision is to help power and support the full DraftKings player lifecycle. We'll be helping DraftKings acquire new players, taking t
