Promoted feature: Stats Perform gives light to sportsbooks
Sports data, streaming and AI pioneer Stats Perform held an action-packed launch for its five new products on 2 March.
The new products include industry-first innovations designed to make livestreaming, player stats bets, same-game multis and other popular sports betting experiences vividly more informative and engaging for bettors.
EGR Intel: How was the big online launch?
Nick Cockerill (NC): It went very well. We’ve had great feedback from operators we’ve worked with before, some we haven’t and even from competitors! The ‘Light Up Your Sportsbook’ message seemed to resonate. It was great to have a fresh take on the way products are launched and a really effective way of showcasing our products in action.
Product launches often focus just on the theory and technical sides of products but because sportsbooks are such customer-centric organisations, showing how products can be used in real life is key to sparking imaginations. We presented more than 30 examples, across all the different products, and showed how they would look actually being used on a sportsbook and what a betting customer will actually experience.
It enabled us to show our products in action to a target audience of over 500 and have it available on-demand for further views. It’s particularly effective in the run up to ICE, as customers are already familiar with your products and have had time to think about their specific needs. We are expecting some really productive meetings there.
EGR: What feedback have you received since?
NC: The main feedback we received is that the products themselves are very disruptive and empowering. There’s been a lot of genuine excitement for new products. Operators especially are really appreciative that the products we’ve launched are a way to accelerate more innovative product development and don’t require them to do all the heavy lifting.That’s a big deal for some.
It’s also interesting that we’ve been contacted by as many engineers and architects as we have commercial and marketing people. I think that’s a reflection of the fact that there is a lot of scope to apply our new products in both plug and play as well as unique, custom ways. They can power a lot of different experiences. We have engineers and architects and product people proactively reaching out to ask for documentation and more details about how to implement the products. It’s really exciting.
EGR: Moving onto your products, why is there a need to add Instant Highlights and Smart Stats Overlays to your official live streams?
NC: We’ve always tried to help our operators offer the best experience. Now they can go from the best experience with the best streaming leagues and make it even better, even more appealing to existing and new users.
Stats Perform tries to always push boundaries – as that’s what leaders do – they take things further than they’ve been taken before. Having the ability to supply great content is brilliant and we continue to lead the market there, but now we’re making our content even more vivid and relevant to more bettors.
We know that many bettors are time-poor and can’t always watch their bet play out, reducing its value to them. Other bettors may find it hard to choose between multiple games streaming concurrently, or lack enough connection to lesser-known leagues to find a game that suits them.
Instant Highlights uses push notifications to draw attention at the most exciting moments of a game, optimising the excitement a customer gets in relatively short bursts of time. It also allows the customer to simultaneously follow multiple games and instantly jump between them when something exciting happens. To achieve this without our product, a customer would need to be constantly flicking between streams, hoping to catch the most exciting moments by chance.
Smart Stats Overlays adds context and interest for bettors specifically. It is contextualised and acknowledges, like Instant Highlights, that the betting customer is fundamentally different to a broadcast viewer. It gives key information and understanding pertinent to thousands of games, specific to bettors, at the right time: it creates a dedicated ‘betcast’ that makes every game more watchable, useful and interesting for bettors, for teams they know and those they don’t.
EGR: What can operators do with the Opta Dynamic Betting Stats API compared to alternatives?
NC:Quite simply, there aren’t any close alternatives. Stats Perform owns Opta, the data brand used across broadcast and media that is synonymous with quality, depth and trust. Our Dynamic Betting Stats API is a massive step forward in simple access to Opta’s timestamped team and player stats.
Some operators might currently be offering basic pre-game stats and insights for high-level outright markets, for two or three of the big leagues. The Dynamic Betting Stats API makes it possible for them to do this for hundreds of leagues, thousands of players and multiple market types, to selection level, even to specific time periods, for example, the last 10 minutes of a game.
But the Dynamic Betting Stats API is actually much more than an extension to what some operators already do. It also unlocks entirely new ways to group or present markets for personalised, faster bet discovery. It can generate alternative bet selections, with the statistics to back them up. It can power graphics and experiences that make it easier than ever for bettors to find and add more legs to a multi. It’s a simple but hugely powerful tool, with unlimited options to completely reshape the betting experience, if that’s what an operator wants.
EGR: What’s the ‘marquee’ feature of Automated Betting Previews and Insights?
NC: The ‘marquee’ feature these products offer is scale. We can generate insights and video and written previews for any match we have data for, which is a huge number. Even better, we can also offer previews and insights in-play, and at player level.
What’s more, we make it available in a way that’s easy to consume and lowers the development effort to get such really compelling content in front of customers, across thousands of events and markets where it previously wasn’t available.
EGR: Do you have anything specific planned for the next 12 months?
NC: Watch out for more sports, more features, more languages and competitions! Our product and innovation teams are really firing and it’s going to be a thrilling year.
After eight years on the operator side at Sky Betting and Gaming, PokerStars and Flutter, Nick Cockerill joined Stats Perform to head up betting products at the start of 2021. His prior experience ranges from account services, payments, operational tech and sportsbook product and design.
