When you look at the state of the gambling industry today, one thing becomes immediately clear: its growth is being driven by technology. There are, of course, other factors at play, but the simple truth is that since the advent of online betting and mobile betting, the industry has simply exploded. It was already huge, to begin with, of course, so that puts the magnitude of this expansion in perspective.
But how exactly is all this new technology helping the gambling industry? Let’s look into it.
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Live betting
Some might get sick of hearing about the way that modern smartphones have revolutionized the way we live. But when it comes to betting and gambling, there’s really no escaping the impact it has had. Even back when mobile betting was in its infancy, the ability to bet as a game or event went along was revolutionary.
Speed and latency, though, have been issues in the past. Mobile service wasn’t always as fast as we could need it to be.
Today, though, 4G is more or less fully implemented. Everyone has super high-speed mobile data with which to bet live on games and betting events like racing or football. Now, as we move on into even faster 5G, this technology is only going to continue helping make live betting faster.
But it’s not just the networks that are faster.
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Faster devices
Smartphones have been on the market for well over a decade now, but they weren’t universally adopted right away. Once they became more widely used, the chips and processors that went into mobile phones became more and more sophisticated as more manufacturers worked on making them more efficient and cheaper.
Because when you are using an app to bet live on an event, the network isn’t the only thing that matters. If your device can’t process the data quickly enough, you’re going to get left behind as well.
So, the development of faster and more affordable smartphones has given almost everyone accesses to more or less instantaneous live betting. This, naturally, has helped the industry attract a lot more consumers and driven its growth to a much wider audience. Around 78% of the world’s population now own a smartphone or device.
Traditional, in-house betting, whether at bookmakers, a casino, or anything, hasn’t always been inviting to everyone. With fast devices and fast networks for live betting, many of those people have been brought into the game.
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VR
VR is still very much an up-and-coming technology, but it has made huge leaps in recent years. It has still not been broadly adopted by the public, and there are large question marks as to whether it ever will.
Nevertheless, it has clear and obvious applications for the betting industry that has helped to gamble. One of the broader points about online betting is that it is far more accessible via online devices, and VR helps this even further.
VR casinos can make the player feel as though they really are out at a casino, and bring an aspect of it to them they might not otherwise experience.
The issue of accessibility is certainly one of the most significant parts of online advancement, and VR is a big help in that arena.
What has become clear over the years is that most industries need to embrace developing technology if they want to survive. This has looked very different for many different industries, but for betting it’s been clear that it’s adapt or get left behind. But it’s easy to see why the technologies are so appealing for the industry: they simply make betting easier in more or less every way.