Watching Live Streaming Sports at Bookmakers

With a great many sites offering live streams of sport around the world, it begs the question, why should I use bookmakers for live streaming? This page covers what bookmaker streaming is good for and what its limits are.

Is Live Streaming Sports Legal?

A bookmaker streaming a sport will normally hold the rights to do so, or have the broadcaster’s permission. A licensed operator has far more to lose from streaming without the rights than an anonymous site does, which is the substance of the argument, though it is not a guarantee of anything — operators have been pulled up on rights before. The exposure is reputational and regulatory, not just commercial.

Streams coming from third party sites are uploaded and streamed at their own risk. Whilst we don’t have any hard facts to give you on this, we would estimate that massive percentage of the streams from the unofficial streaming sites that come and go are hosting illegally in some shape or form. That is a risk for the sites. The viewer's exposure is practical rather than legal: an unknown site is a worse bet for malware and for a stream that fails at the wrong moment.

Are Live Streams at Bookmakers High Quality?

When it comes to watching your favorite sport, it’s all about a quality feed. A pixelated, poor quality stream will make it almost impossible to clearly view the sport, especially sports such as football, ice hockey and tennis where the object balls are extremely small even to start. As each stream gets passed through friends and family, then again linked on a social network somewhere potentially reaching tens of thousands of people, the stream will be so diluted in terms of quality, that viewing will become unpleasant at best.

Live streaming bookmakers will have dedicated servers to handle to demands of traffic those live sports streams incur. That generally means a more reliable stream than an unofficial one, though quality still varies by event and by operator. That the streams usually carry no separate charge is a real advantage, set against the conditions attached to them.

Betting and Watching Sports Live Go Hand in Hand

The modern day punter is increasingly making more bets on the live in-play markets than ever before. For these bets to become successful it’s almost essential that they can have live access to the game in order to react to changes in the market. Your live streaming platform via your bookmaker will allow you to seamlessly make bets whilst keeping an eye of every possible action throughout the game.

Avoid Viruses and Malware

Viruses and malware are factors that everyone fights in some way every time they come online. The security argument for a bookmaker's stream is simply that it is served by a licensed company you already have an account with, rather than by an unknown site that wants you to install something first.

With most live streaming channels you will be asked to either download an add-on or update an extension to your browser in order to view it. In contrary to this, betting sites with live streaming will more often than not, not require you to download anything. Streams play in the browser, so there is nothing to install.

Live Streaming Is Usually Ad Free

We all know how frustrating it can be browsing any site when a host of ads suddenly appear on your screen that you either don’t want or simply can’t get rid of, forcing us off the site. Well, the last thing a bookmaker wants to do is give you any reason to leave their site, quite the opposite, in fact.

A bookmaker's stream generally carries no advertising of its own and no pop-ups — though the page around it is, of course, the bookmaker's. They have you in their site already; they don’t need to keep advertising the fact to you.

Streaming Is Usually Free, but Not Unconditional

The majority of online bookmakers with live streaming allow punters active sportsbook accounts to use their streaming services. A host of sports can be watched without a subscription, a registration fee or a one-off payment — though in almost every case you need a funded account, a bet on the event, or both, which is the condition that replaced the fee.

One thing you may have to do on some sites is place a bet on a certain match to then have your viewing rights for that match enabled. This is more often the case with horse racing as many bookmakers actually use the services of major satellite racing channels rather than their own coverage. But, if you had planned to bet on that specific race anyway, then you will still be getting their services for free.

Watch Sports You Didn't Know You Were Interested In

If you look on the majority of sports terrestrial and satellite channels the sports that are on there will be pretty mainstream. Football, cricket, rugby, golf, American football, baseball, basketball, you know, the usual suspects of the sporting world. But as these sports are covered in depth via your TV, it leaves a gap in the market for bookmakers to then seal the licenses to show lesser sports on their website. Anything from handball, volleyball, snooker, table tennis, darts, badminton, water polo and so many more are shown via major online bookmaker’s streams.

The bookmakers aren’t shooting for viewing figures from the streaming services. Granted they want it to pull punters in but in all honesty it’s more an added feature that punters will want rather than a specialist service that they are promoting on its own.