October 2020 Interview
Keith O’Loughlin, Senior Vice President, Sportsbook
Scientific Games
scientificgames.com
The industry as a whole showed its resilience during the shutdown of live sports earlier this year. It was an incredibly challenging period for everyone and required all stakeholders to pull together to ensure customers still received entertaining experiences when major sports were halted. We worked very closely with all of our partners to ensure they had relevant and exciting betting opportunities to offer their customers even in the absence of live sports. Scientific Games’ content aggregation platform, OpenMarket, proved highly valuable to operators this year by providing them with premium content through a single integration.
OpenMarket is the industry’s only sports aggregation platform and consists of products such as virtuals and esports, as well as free-to-play content, scoreboards, data feeds and marketing tools. With 36 different content providers connected to OpenMarket, the comprehensive offering provides plenty of choice. These key assets have already driven increased revenues for operators, allowing sportsbooks to differentiate themselves through engaging content, as well as prepare for further disruption in the future with access to substitute products. The ease of OpenMarket with the removal of complex agreements meant that operators were able to adjust their offering quickly and seamlessly.
Demand for sports betting is still strong despite the events that have unfolded this year. Now more than ever it is important to evolve the experience to keep customers engaged and coming back for more. The U.S. sports betting landscape is expanding at a pace and Scientific Games will be at the heart of future developments, with our OpenSports™ technology powering sportsbooks for operators, casinos and tribes across multiple states. We are very proud of our partnerships with several tribal operators and will continue to deliver exciting sports betting experiences for their customers.
Recently, we launched retail sports betting for FireKeepers Casino, owned by the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi (NHBP), with our OpenSports™ product suite going live at ‘Dacey’s Sportsbook’ in June. It was a landmark moment as they became the first tribal operator to launch sports betting in Michigan. OpenSports™ is the ultimate solution for tribal operators as it provides over hundreds of markets across all U.S. sports along with international sports such as soccer and golf, all driven by our leading technology.