Re:Loser's Lunch
by dmurray on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @05:36PM
(#17913027)
I don't understand why the tennis organisers care so much about cracking down on this. Their incentives are mainly aligned with the courtsiders: they pay for seats and facilitate gambling which encourages viewers. The data firms like Sportradar are the only ones with a financial incentive to stamp them out: their service is worth more if it's a monopoly. So they must be putting the squeeze on the tennis federations and threatening to cancel contracts.
It's clear that the Sportradar service isn't competitive for real-time gambling, but why don't they offer a service that is? Put a guy at each match entering the scores (and any other information) faster than the chair umpire and sell that data. If there's enough money to have multiple spotters and courtsiders (up to 50) at the event, Sportradar should be able to capture enough of that to employ one person to do data entry.
It's clear that the Sportradar service isn't competitive for real-time gambling, but why don't they offer a service that is? Put a guy at each match entering the scores (and any other information) faster than the chair umpire and sell that data. If there's enough money to have multiple spotters and courtsiders (up to 50) at the event, Sportradar should be able to capture enough of that to employ one person to do data entry.