NBA pursuing live betting technology for NBA League Pass

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2018 allowing legalized sports gambling across the country, legal betting has taken place in physical casinos and sportsbooks, and on the apps of those sportsbooks (illegal betting of course persists, especially in states that have not yet legalized). 

The NFL’s move earlier this month allowing its game streams to be viewed within the league’s official sportsbook partners’ apps is a new twist, but it didn’t change the paradigm of where the bets are placed. What about directly from the screen showing the games?

The NBA is currently laying the groundwork for the possibility to offer betting directly from a game stream for NBA League Pass. To date only Major League Rugby has announced similar plans.

Scott Kaufman-Ross, Senior Vice President, Head of Gaming & New Business Ventures, NBA, said the league’s plans are still preliminary, but the effort is another way the Association is trying to customize digital experiences for its fans.

“The mission here is to try to serve our fans interested in betting with interesting content,” he said, adding viewers of League Pass would need to opt-in to see the betting information. What the step-by-step user process would entail in activating the betting overlay on League Pass is not determined, a point Kaufman-Ross underscored in emphasizing that it is the early stages of the initiative.

Kaufman-Ross placed the League Pass initiative into its larger relationship with Sportradar, which is the official NBA global provider of data and created the technology for the integration. For the first time this season Sportradar will make available to sportsbooks the NBA’s player tracking data. It is up to the sports books whether to create bets using the data, which could provide information on for example on how far players run or the longest made shot.

“No one out there at the moment supports live betting directly tied to the OTT streaming experience,” said Patrick Mostboeck, senior vice president audiovisual for Sportradar. “Especially not from the major leagues’ perspective. So I think the NBA clearly, and this is the effort that we’re supporting here, wants to take a leading role and kind of wants to lead as a property.”

The NBA has long occupied a trendsetting position within the pro sports universe by embracing sports betting. Four years before the Supreme Court’s legalized sports betting decision, NBA commissioner Adam Silver urged Congress to lift the ban in an op-ed in the New York Times.

After the Supreme Court order, the NBA moved swiftly to add sportsbooks as league partners. Its existing partnership with DraftKings started in 2019. In 2021, NBA TV launched NBABets, a 30-minute show dedicated to NBA betting. That same year the league inked its roughly decade long deal with Sportradar.

Betting directly from the game screen is something of the white whale of sports gambling, in part because of the complexity in making it happen. The company behind Major League Rugby’s effort, TAPPP, needs permissions from each state’s gambling authority, and must block the tech in those states where betting is still disallowed. It had once planned to trot out the technology during the last MLR season but there were too many boxes to check to get it done.

It’s no coincidence that the initial forays into live betting in the game feeds is coming through league-owned assets. On non-league owned platforms, like a broadcaster such as ESPN or NBC, their buy-in is necessary. As the traditional media business contracts, giving them a slice of income from bets made on their broadcasts might be a way to get over that hurdle.

For Sportradar, the NBA League Pass effort is the first real world test of its technology that interlays gambling information on a game stream. Sportradar’s Moestbook draws the distinction between this offering and that of one of its competitors, Genius Sports. Genius, the NFL’s official data provider, enables sportsbook customers to watch the game within their operator’s app. 

The difference is Genius works within the sportsbook ecosystem, and Sportradar plan is to operate in the OTT world. In other words, the Genius model takes the games and inserts them in the sportsbooks apps, while Sportradar wants to take elements of the sportsbook apps and overlay them within the game stream.

Ultimately if the NBA allows betting through NBA League Pass, fans will still need a sportsbook account.

A tricky aspect of gambling through a game feed is latency, or the lag between the live game and the broadcast, which can be a few seconds or longer. That will make microbets, such as whether a team will score on the next possession, unlikely on this platform.  

For now that is a remote worry as the first task is to get the live odds up and running that Sportradar’s Moestbeck cited, while other content is certainly possible.

“Step by step we’re working together with the NBA to turn the NBA League Pass into a more interactive and exciting direction,” said Moestbeck. “So… different kinds of engagement opportunities, like quizzes and polls, again, all around the theme of sports betting. And then we want to, I would say with a horizon of, as of now 12 to 18 months, we also want to enable the betting opportunity within the League Pass.”

Kaufman-Ross, however, said there is no timeline for offering betting through League Pass, and he said if wagering does come in the future, it could also be in the league’s media partner’s games. He cited the complexity of enabling sports gambling on a game feed, which is what’s delayed MLR’s effort.

Still, it seems inevitable the day will come when a fan can watch an NBA game on their device and press a button to bet.