We sure have come a long way in terms of internet based sports betting. Think about this for a second: If online sports betting was a person, it would not be old enough to drink, and just old enough to be declared a legal adult.
In that short time we have gone from very basic sports bets being taken on dial up connections in simplistic forms, to live bets being taken in the process of an actual event. The amount of innovation and evolution we have seen in the sports betting industry is absolutely shocking, and if you weren’t paying attention you would never have known it happened.
The Early Days
Let’s start out in the early days of internet sports betting. The industry was born in a day when computers were commonly accepted as part of society, but not so readily owned that there were one, two, or even three PCs in the same household.
Prior to its invention, sports bets would have to be taken by phone and recorded on paper by your local bookie. Basically, it was a simple system, and there was no sure way to know what you were getting. If you lived in a regulated area, things were a bit better with the establishment of retail joints, but still nothing to call home about.
But then the world changed. After the first internet casinos popped up in 1994, sports betting sites followed soon after. As stated above, those first sites were rude, crude, and limited by the slow connection speeds and processing power. Even with those simple times, the framework was being laid for the innovation and growth of the sports betting industry that we all know today.
The Boom Years
As computers grew exponentially better and internet speeds grew faster, so did online sports betting. We began to see more and more types of payments being accepted by betting sites, as well as betting lines that were more quickly updated than ever before.
This gave better incentive to players, who at the same time were being treated to lucrative sign up and deposit bonuses. By 2005 sports betting became a major worldwide industry, notching up more than $100 billion in wagers each year across thousands of operational sites.
Those surely were the boom times for the internet sports betting industry, but there was still much more room to grow.
Sports Betting Goes Mobile
The late 2,000’s saw the advent of the iPhone, a phone that offered the ability to use the internet and specific applications, giving the user all new ways to consume content. The sports betting industry was quick to adapt to this, and the mobile sports betting market blossomed.
Mobile sports betting was literally a game changer, as punters were able to place a bet on a sporting event from anywhere that they could have cellular service. Sitting at the bus station? Place a bet on the NBA. Enjoying a football game at the stadium and want to enhance your experience? A mobile sports wager is at your fingertips.
Revenues responded accordingly, and the mobile market is quickly becoming dominant in the industry. Nowadays, betting on Android is surpassing the iOS numbers which is probably a direct correlation to the shift of powers between the big two.
Innovations such as live betting are incredible, and the very fact that we are able to see lines evolve before our very eyes while watching a stream or broadcast from our living rooms is something that a punter from the 1990’s would not be able to believe.
It is that last paragraph that sums up the beauty of the sports betting industry. Whenever you look to a major technological innovation in the past twenty years, sports betting has somehow evolved its approach to compliment those same innovations.
The ability to keep up with the changing trends is what has helped propel online sports betting to become the multi billion dollar industry that it has turned into today.
But what about the future? What are we apt to see coming from sports betting developers in the near and long term? Will it be social integration? Will augmented reality somehow come into our homes with sports betting overlaying various items onto a screen?
The answer is: Who knows? But given the fact that it has always been a cutting edge industry, it’s exciting to see exactly where the online sports betting world is headed.