NEW YORK — While outlining his vision for the concept of microtransactions being implemented into NBA League Pass next fall to allow fans to purchase small segments of live action instead of whole games or seasons, commissioner Adam Silver hinted at the possibility of expanding the concept to gambling if the upcoming Supreme Court ruling leads to legalized sports betting.
Silver, who wrote a 2014 New York Times op-ed to legalize and regulate sports gambling, said the same mechanism of in-app purchases could conceivably be applied to making wagers while watching games.
“I think the vision goes as far as the imagination,” Silver said. “I’m not a technologist myself, but I’ve found that, to the extent that we can imagine things, within reason, technologists can figure out how to do them. What I’ve found is, especially in the last few years, the over-the-top platforms have allowed us to do things that we truly only could dream about in the past.”
Silver met with reporters after taking part in the Turner Sports event to launch its Bleacher Report Live OTT service last week. He has spoken favorably about the presentation of esports streams on Twitch and expounded on that point to say NBA fees could offer different data fields along with the traditional game broadcast, bringing up the idea of legalized sports betting unprompted.
In response to a follow-up question about this idea, Silver said, “In Europe, for example, where sports betting is legal, people can watch streams of games and then bet as they’re watching them. That could conceivably be another form of a microtransaction, and much of the sports betting has moved to in-play, which is one of the reasons why people want to watch the live feeds.”
Silver gave a couple hypothetical examples of in-play betting — that instead of simply betting on standard categories like win or loss, point spread and over/under, a fan could wager on the number of points a particular player will score in the next quarter or even if a shooter will make the next two free throws.
“Those are all potential, additional forms of engagement for viewers,” Silver said.
Charged with delivering much of the infrastructure behind such a plan would be Sportradar, the NBA’s official provider of real-time statistics and a global leader in sports gambling integrity services including the monitoring of betting markets for irregularities.
“We believe that there will be an array of sports betting products offered to a legal and regulated US market, which would include a multitude of player propositions and betting on specific outcomes (such as the amount of strikes for the next at-bat or total rushing yards on the next drive), in addition, this could also be extended to be offered in real time during an NBA game or any game,” Sportradar U.S. deputy president Laila Mintas, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on online gambling, said in an email. “This type of wagering is offered internationally and to a limited extent in Nevada, for example, on the Super Bowl, and linking this type of sports betting product offering to an OTT offering does make sense as the market expands and matures.”
The NBA and Major League Baseball have collaborated on lobbying efforts to state legislatures. Legal Sports Report obtained the leagues’ one-page summary document that carried the headline, “Protecting the integrity of sports in a regulated sports betting market,” emphasizing that leagues “should be compensated for their investments, risks and integrity expenses.” As a result, the leagues are seeking a one percent integrity fee as a royalty.
In a press conference at the NBA All-Star Game, Silver elaborated on the idea, “I would only say from the NBA’s standpoint we will spend this year roughly $7.5 billion creating this content, creating these games. Those are total expenses for the season. So this notion that as the intellectual property creators that we should receive a 1 percent fee seems very fair to me.”
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“I will say what will come with legalized sports betting are enormous additional expenses for the league that go directly to integrity,” Silver added. “Our ability to monitor that data, our ability to flag problem issues, trends around the league, enforcement, additional training.
“So, again, we’ve never suggested that this is the only way to look at it. In fact, the 1% came directly from other jurisdictions outside the United States that used that very fee as the model for how leagues or content creators should be compensated for the use of their intellectual property.”