BTopenworld launched an online betting portal today with a who's who of operators, including ukbetting, Sun International Hotels, Station Casinos, Rank Group and OddsChecker.
A division of British Telecom, BTopenworld is one of the United Kingdom's leading Internet service providers. The betting site, which will feature casino, lottery, sports betting and bingo, will be accessible from the homepage that BTopenworld users see when they log on.
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". . . [BTopenworld] is pro a more important portal than MSN or Yahoo! in the U.K. because so many people are going to be accessing that as their homepage."
- David Annat
ukbetting
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David Annat, managing director of sports content for ukbetting, said the exposure provided by a link on BTopenworld makes the deal one of ukbetting's most strategic alliances. Two weeks ago, ukbetting announced an agreement to provide sports betting for British mobile phone service operator Orange.
"We see this as an even more important strategic deal because BT is by far the largest telecoms provider and it's going to dominate the broadband market," he said. "Therefore, it's probably a more important portal than MSN or Yahoo! in the U.K. because so many people are going to be accessing that as their homepage."
John Raczka, BTopenworld's senior vice president of content, said his company is planning a massive subscription drive for its broadband services that could substantially increase the amount of marketing exposure the betting site gets. The ISP today has more than 2 million narrowband users and about 100,000 broadband users.
"Our new CEO has made a commitment that we will have one million broadband users by the end of this fiscal year, which gives you an idea of how much marketing muscle is going to be put behind broadband this year by BT," he said. "BT, by the way, is the second largest advertiser in the U.K., so when they want to get out the marketing hammer, believe me, they can."
Raczka said the company's betting partners will "ride that wave of BT's enormous push for broadband" in the upcoming months.
The link to "sports and bets" from BTopenworld's homepage was introduced today. SunOnline, a joint venture between Sun International and Station Casinos, is supplying the casino games; ukbetting is providing sports content and betting; Rank Group is providing bingo, keno and fruit machine games; Coral Eurobet is providing live odds on sporting events; and OddsChecker is supplying consumer information about which sports books have the best odds. The destination site will also feature a daily lottery and results for the National Lottery.
Raczka said none of BTopenworld's agreements with wagering operators are exclusive for either party. The ISP wants to offer its users a "best of the Web"-type array of sites to choose from rather than deliberately narrowing the user's selections. BTopenworld is in discussions with MGM Mirage to add its online gambling site to the list of options.
Each betting site operator will pay BTopenworld a bounty on how many players the portal supplies to individual wagering sites. Raczka said the ISP will not participate in any individual bets and will therefore be invulnerable to the fortunes of the gaming sites. BTopenworld will also charge the gaming companies a distribution fee for their place on the site.
Up to 25 percent of the visitors to BTopenworld's music channel are American, but only U.K. residents will be able to bet using the site. Raczka said it was very important to BT that its wagering partners had the ability to block users from jurisdictions where online gambling is illegal.
"Basically that was very important to us at BT to make sure that the partners we worked with had more to lose in this space than we did, from a comfort position--because as you can imagine, BT's in the public eye, being a utility company," he said. "Therefore we had to be very careful who we got in bed with, so to speak."
Annat of ukbetting said it is a major move for BTopenworld to even allow online betting on it site. As for why the ISP decided to offer online gambling, he brought up the fact that I-gaming is one of the few profitable e-commerce enterprises available.