According to a new report from Research and Markets, betting exchanges will do to the betting industry throughout Europe what eBay and Napster did to the retail and the music industries: they will revolutionize and change it forever.
While legal issues currently seem to dominate the discussions in the gambling industry across Europe, one of the most successful phenomena in the industry remains largely unknown outside the UK. For some time now, betting exchanges have revolutionized the market of sports betting in the UK and have successfully competed for a large market share against traditional bookmakers.
Betting exchanges act as online intermediaries in a person-to-person model between individual bettors, allowing them to bet against each other. The punters can either take the traditional role and back the bets offered by somebody else, or they can function as “bookmakers” themselves and offer their own bets without having to have a bookmaker\’s license.
In a separate report, Research and Markets predicts that the number of privatized state gambling operations will continue to increase in the near future.
Hard-to-control internet gambling offers and the intensive debate about increasing liberalization make life difficult for state-controlled operators. Although they recently won some “battles”, according to many experts business will not get any easier for them, and the value of state-controlled operators will probably decrease rather than increase in the future.
This fact combined with tight budgets might lead a growing number of state shareholders to see the regular contributions to state budgets in jeopardy and prompt them to consider privatizing their gambling operations as soon as possible. Indeed, recent and current privatizations, such as those of the Greek OPAP and the UK Tote, show that this is not just idle speculation.
Calculators
