Why Do We Need Entire Live Sports Broadcasts Dedicated To Gambling?
We learned from the Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast that MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred intends to have gambling-focused broadcasts in the future.
"I see that at some point coming as an alternate, digital product. You're always going to have that clean broadcast. If we get there to the betting off the screen, it's going to be a separate, digital feed that the true gambler can opt into."
Let’s get this out of the way: This example No. 1,097 of Major League Baseball and other leagues being completely unserious entities when it comes to gambling. Before the fall of the federal sports betting ban in 2018, MLB would tell anyone who would listen that gambling would be the death of its sport. Now, it will do anything to make more money from sports gambling.
But I digress; most of you know the hypocrisy exists, but it still needs to be pointed out, lest we forget.
But let’s get back to gambling-focused broadcasts, which the NBA has already tested. I have concerns with these broadcasts, starting with: Do we really need this?
I know it will be done, but this is not on the first page in the laundry list of things we can do to grow legal sports betting in the United States.
Yes, it continues the promotion of legal sportsbooks over offshore ones, that’s at least a worthy goal. But at the end of the day, a gambling broadcast generally serves a product to the already converted. These people are so into gambling that they will watch gambling analysis for two and a half hours. Someone who is new to betting or a casual bettor would be intimidated by or not attracted to this kind of presentation.
A gambling broadcast can help with brand awareness to a sportsbook partner, sure, and also drive more engagement and revenue for a sportsbook. The flip side of that is you are trying to get people to bet constantly on a game. We are then veering into a responsible gambling discussion of whether MLB should encourage that behavior.
What baseball (and other sports) needs to do first is make gambling on its sports accessible. I haven’t seen many good examples of that in the wild. We get live reads with live odds on baseball games from announcers who barely understand gambling. Not great.
Other problems with live gambling broadcasts I see:
The number of people who can pull off an interesting live gambling broadcast is at this moment very small. The product will probably be awful because of a lack of talent.
Latency. For instance, the “live” stream on the MLB TV app is nowhere near real-time. Any gambling broadcast is going to be based on old data. Interestingly, this problem is already being tackled in low-latency streams for NFL games being used by sportsbooks. If MLB can figure out the latency problem for everyone, then maybe it has something.
Of course, I hate almost everything, so take my words with a grain of salt. I overindex in the amount of baseball I watch and the amount I bet on baseball vs. the average fan. And I can’t envision myself watching something like this. This is anecdotal, of course, but I would be the target audience.
I think gambling-focused broadcasts from the leagues themselves are not things we need at this point in the lifecycle, and perhaps not ever.
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