With the popularity of live sports betting and sports as a whole, the NBA has launched a live betting odds feature, allowing users to place bets on their favorite basketball betting sites in its app for League Pass subscribers. In addition to allowing users to watch basketball games, they can also bet, which can stimulate engagement in the sports field.
Sportradar, as a renowned sports technology corporation, proposed this type of integrative environment. Scott Kaufman-Ross, the NBA’s executive vice president media and gaming, says, “As more of our fans consume content on digital platforms, it unlocks new ways for them to interact with our games.” Digital media is mainstream, as over 92.3% of internet users access the online network via mobile devices. By implementing more app-based features, the NBA can engage more of the online community.
Thanks to Sportradar’s collaboration, the NBA’s new live betting feature offers a seamless experience. Viewers can effortlessly track odds and place bets through the NBA’s betting partners. Sportradar’s OTT (over-the-top) streaming platform, emBET, will display betting lines for money lines, over-unders and point spreads. This feature is available to viewers in any state, but betting is restricted to states that have legalized mobile sports wagering.
Kaufman-Ross has expressed the league’s aim to provide “hyper-personalized and customized viewing experiences within NBA games.” This vision led to the introduction of Sportradar’s emBET technology, an exclusive feature for NBA League Pass subscribers. The innovative solution is an opt-in feature that appears only when a subscriber selects an odds overlay for a live game. While currently available only to mobile users, the league has plans to extend this feature to smart TVs and desktops.
Kaufman-Ross said that emBET’s integration into the NBA is “the first-of-its-kind in-app betting option from a U.S. pro sports league.” The NBA has a vision of live in-game micro-betting, meaning that sports gambling and sports can converge and lead to increased user immersion and engagement. While microbetting takes up a fraction of the gambling market in the United States, its volume is substantial in the United Kingdom.
The NBA’s partnership with nVenue, an analytics agency, has paved the way for exciting future developments. After participating in the association’s Launchpad program, nVenue earned an equity stake in the NBA. This collaboration has led to the introduction of new in-game gambling markets, such as betting on the first team to 11 points or predicting which player will score five points first. As technology advances, the NBA envisions offering in-game betting directly in the app, eliminating the need for users to navigate to external platforms.
emBET hopes to continue seamlessly delivering wagering functionality for sports bettors while also supplying interactive content, including advanced player and team insights, trivia widgets, voting capabilities and polls. Because of Sportradar’s exclusive admission to optical-tracking data from the NBA, Sportradar will be able to develop these dynamic functionalities in the future.
The news and editorial staffs of the Baltimore Sun had no role in this post’s preparation.