Opportunity

Over recent years, online gambling has become the highest growth area on the net and a crucial revenue generator for all global gambling companies. As such, competition to attract punters in this highly cluttered marketplace is becoming ever more difficult.

Each year Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaking company, sponsor the Irish Open Poker competition for a selected 300 poker players. The event is run over the Easter Weekend and the winner has the opportunity to win total prize money of 600,000 Euros and the much coveted title.

This year it was decided that live video streaming of the event would attract a wider global audience and therefore attract more on-line bets. Having pitched for this opportunity, fiNETra was invited to stream the event, to the Paddy Power web site, live from Dublin.

Solution

Working in association with WinMedia TV, fiNETra managed to run 5 consecutive live video streams from the hosting arena. These streams covered the main table, the player’s card hands and the arena and featured two live commentators, who provided witty banter and advice on the poker hands.

Paddy Power established an online gambling system, running in parallel with the live video streams, enabling punters to bet, in real time, on the lay of the cards.

Results

Since this was the first live event for Paddy Power, a soft launch was planned with only a few links on the site to promote the live event.

To everyone’s surprise, at its peak, the event attracted over 12,000 concurrent viewers, with “a more than satisfactory”, undisclosed amount of betting revenue generated!

Paddy Power were so impressed with the effectiveness of the fiNETra solution that they are now planning a series of European events, covering a wider range of sports.