Pulse
Simulated Reality: Healthy Competition
By Lewis - 10 June 2020
The return of live sport directly competes with Sportradar’s latest product, Simulated Reality. Werner Becher explains why launching the postponed European Championships on the AI-driven platform provides healthy competition.
How has the product performed since it launched at the start of April?
When we conceptualised Simulated Reality in late March and launched just 10 days later, we pivoted our roadmap and strategy in response to the crisis period many bookmakers were, and still are, undergoing due to a lack of live sport. Simulated Reality has been a great success and the team behind it has done a fantastic job of creating long tail content while more premium events largely have been unavailable.
We have been offering Simulated Reality to all our bookmaker clients over the last few weeks – at no additional cost to existing customers. Our vision for this product was always to offer it for free at a time when the industry needed it the most.
How is Sportradar providing fans with tournament football this summer?
We are offering all our clients and their customers the opportunity to play out the European Championship tournament in full via Simulated Reality offering matches for all 51 games including the final on Sunday 12 July.
In the previous iteration of the product, we only provided stats for each game; however, we have added more multimedia for each match with short, live video replays of significant moments within a game including shots on target, own goals and penalties, plus automatically generated match reports which provide a summary of each game alongside in-depth match statistics and analysis.
These new features are in addition to more than 50 pre-match and live betting markets available for each match. For our technical teams it is extremely important for the accuracy of each game to be as high as possible. They have worked tirelessly to provide the most realistic outcome, and at the same time, increase the visualisation of each game which will continue to evolve. Our focus is to provide punters with the best possible experience.
Crucially this content has been sourced and delivered to the market with the same industry leading security and integrity processes and measures in place that Sportradar has always adhered to. Maintaining the integrity of the data and products we provide, together with that of the sporting events themselves, is a key building block of everything we do.
How are Sportradar keeping fans engaged in Simulated Reality now that live football has is returning?
The European Championship Simulated Reality tournament comes at the perfect time, alongside the return of several major football leagues. We must remember this is only the beginning of premium sport coming back and not every league is up and running, so operators and fans will want more content, and we can offer them that with Simulated Reality.
It is ideal to run it in parallel to some of the major European leagues, which have either returned or are due to do so soon. We’re playing out the tournament as per the original schedule, which means we will have multiple games every day for four weeks, which includes games in the evenings and at weekends presenting a packed calendar of action, entertainment, and betting opportunities.
Running Simulated Reality alongside the return of live action leagues will present our clients and their customers with even more content at a time when they need and want it most. Real sport is returning and sits directly in competition with Simulated Reality but, from what we have seen and learned in the last few weeks since launch, it will be healthy competition.
Did Sportradar find the return of the Bundesliga impacted the level of engagement with Simulated Reality, be it positively or negatively?
We have now completed the Simulated Reality season across several major leagues and we have noticed encouraging patterns of user behaviour, including bookmakers telling us that 60 to 70 per cent of players who place live bets on live Bundesliga matches also watch and bet on Simulated Reality.
Many players, for instance, back a real game against Simulated Reality or they combine bets. The product makes sense to them and they have developed a lot of trust in it over the last few weeks.
We provide an average of 400,000 live events per year to our clients. Remember, having the major European leagues in Germany, England, Italy, and Spain back is only a few games a week, therefore it realistically does not move the needle for clients or sports fans.
There is still a lot of room for other alternative betting products such as Simulated Reality, so having the Euro tournament play out during the week and at weekends at different times is important for bookmakers, while punters are always looking for more content.
By the end of the summer, most sports will have returned in one format or another. What is next for Simulated Reality post-European Championships?
Sports fans have established a high level of trust with Simulated Reality since it was launched, and this is increasing week by week. As this year progresses, we strongly believe this will continue to grow and the product will go from strength-to-strength.
We will continue to invest in Simulated Reality in the coming months so our clients can provide their customers with highly engaging content.
