Afleveringen
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Rarely has there been an episode of the Gaming News Canada Show for some time now where artificial intelligence doesn’t come up in our conversations with leaders, experts and media folks.
Your humble host recently finished Superintelligence: Is Canada Ready for AI? published by The Logic and was inspired to delve deeper into the world of AI as it relates to the business of gaming and sports business. Enter Seth Schorr, the CEO of Fifth Street Gaming and founding partner of GMA Consulting.
Schorr made his maiden appearance on the podcast and detailed the use of AI in both his professional and personal life these days, and the many ways it’s being exploited across the industry he’s been a part of for more than 25 years since his early days at The Mirage and Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas.
The Fifth Street Gaming boss also got into the evolution of AI globally in the gambling business- in responsible gaming programs, content and on-site at bricks-and-mortar casinos - the efficiencies it provides and the ongoing need for human resources to support its use. Schorr also gave a shoutout to both ChatGPT and Gamma, which uses AI to produce presentations and decks.
We also asked Schorr to look into his crystal ball at how AI will continue to evolve.
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When Don Bourgeois and Harley Redlick showed up at a Canadian Gaming Association event just before Christmas in December 2023, inquiring minds among the attendees asked the pair of Osgoode Hall Law School graduates when they were bringing back a gambling law certification program launched in 2017 only to be placed on hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Well, Bourgeois and Redlick listened and the result is the return of the five-module program, which will begin April 3 and run through early May.
The two gambling industry veterans were Steve McAllister’s guest on a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc. Bourgeois, who has more than 25 years of experience in the gaming sector and Redlick of Sharp Edge Picks fame, summarized the curriculum for the 2025 program – which reflects the evolving legal gambling industry in Ontario and the rest of Canada. They also told our humble host the potential beneficiaries of participating in the program.
The pair also weighed in on the evolution – and the wins and losses - of Ontario’s regulated marketplace since launching in April 2022, and provided some thoughts on the launch of an expanded legal sector in Alberta.
And, oh yes, we asked Redlick for his thoughts on Super Bowl LIX; the Philadelphia Eagles’ surprising dismantling of the Kansas City Chiefs delivered a banner evening to sportsbooks (as reported yesterday by Patrick Everson for Fox Sports).
To register for the Osgoode Certificate in Gambling Law and for more information, please visit osgoodepd.ca.
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In case there was any doubt that Sunday’s Super Bowl LIX will be a really big deal among the betting populace, a Responsible Gambling Council-commissioned survey shows more Ontarians will place a wager on the Eagles-Chiefs tilt than last year’s NFL championship game. Also this week, the American Gaming Association announced an estimated $1.39 billion in wagers will be taken by legal sportsbooks across the U.S. of A. on the game.
Those wagers will be a blend of moneylines, over-unders, player props and those novelty wagers around the coin toss, national anthem, Kendrick Lamar’s halftime gala, Taylor-Travis and more. Among the operators preparing the smorgasbord of betting options is Ontario licensee FanDuel, so we welcomed back to the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG the operator’s Director of Content Activation and Brand, Alannah Della Vedova, and Vice President of Marketing Tom Burdakin.
Host Steve McAllister asked Della Vedova and Burdakin not only about the Super Bowl – including its latest Kick of Destiny campaign featuring the brothers Manning, and its plans around its Bell Media partnership for Sunday’s game – but some other topics including:
- The continued appetite by Ontario customers for online casino and other games in the province’s regulated gambling marketplace, and FanDuel’s response;
- FanDuel’s investment in women’s sports, including the partnership it announced in December with the Professional Women’s Hockey League;
- The recent announcement by ESPN that the Worldwide Leader was launching a responsible gambling campaign featuring anchor Elle Duncan, and the potential for TSN and Sportsnet to follow suit;
- FanDuel’s efforts around responsible gambling, including the launch of its My Spend customer dashboard at the end of last year.
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Under other circumstances, last week’s announcement about the launch of another awards show in the sports betting and gaming industry would induce a shaking of the eyes and a scratching of the scalp. After all this is an industry which throws out awards like promises during election campaigns.
But. . . when WagerWire co-founder Travis Geiger and gambling startups insider Jesse Learmonth (the man behind the Betting Startups podcast, which your humble host at The Parleh co-founder/CEO Mark Silver appeared way back in December 2021) got together with an idea to recognize the efforts of new businesses in the business of gambling, we thought “OK, tell us more.” So, Geiger and Learmonth were our guests on the latest episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc. to walk us through their raison d’etre for The Starties, which will make their debut at next month’s NEXT.io Summit New York.
Learmonth and Geiger presented the back story behind the awards, which has a presenting sponsor in Eberg Capital and additional backing from Defy the Odds, Optimove Ignite+ and Sportradar Futures Hub. By the by, nominations are now being accepted for the various categories. They also discussed the current state of real-money gaming startups, including the opportunities and challenges for new businesses.
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Gambling industry veteran Amanda Brewer returned to Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc, having just. . . er returned. . . from last week’s ICE Barcelona conference.
Brewer shared her thoughts on the move of ICE to the Spanish city from London, and some of the many conversations she had with members of the Canadian Gaming Association and stakeholders from other parts of sports betting and gaming universe. Not surprisingly, Brewer was frequently asked last week what in the world of Connor McDavid is going on with regulated gambling in the province of Alberta.
The industry veteran also responded to our question about a recent report from FINTRAC Canada that online gambling sites are being used to launder proceeds from fentanyl dealing and production (Dave Briggs covered this in the Wednesday newsletter). Brewer pointed us to a LinkedIn post from another gambling biz veteran, Kinectify executive Derek Ramm, with his take on the alert from FINTRAC.
Our conversation with Brewer also included the latest market performance report from iGaming Ontario and the organization’s move to providing monthly reports; the status of a centralized self-exclusion program in Ontari-ari-ari-o; the potential impact of a provincial election on the industry; and Briggs’s reporting last week that fake social media ads promoting phony online casino products on Meta and other social media platforms.
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If you’ve been following along with the writings and audio recordings on this (mostly) august media platform, you know all about the still-growing popularity of igaming within the world of gambling.
So, when sports media industry confreres Steve McAllister and Jason Sukrahj reconnected on the latest episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc, there was some talk about the current state of media, sporting style. But the conversation eventually shifted to SportsGrid shifting more than a middling amount of attention to online casino and other games. That was punctuated in the final quarter of 2024 when the U.S.-based multimedia content and technology company brought into the fold casino content personality Brian Christopher – who along with his life and BC Ventures partner Marco Bianchi were our guests on the podcast during last summer’s Canadian Gaming Summit – and golf and social media celebutante Paige Spirnac.
Sukrahj, the general manager, audience and Canada at SportGrid and sports industry veteran, gave us the goods on the company’s investment in Christopher and Spirnac, whose Gimme Props show will launch next month during Super Bowl week.
And, of course, the chat included a look at the ever-changing attempts to integrate sports betting content into traditional sports media networks and programming, and the growth of SportsGrid in the streaming universe.
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The latest episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc is one of the two-segment variety.
Paul Burns, the president and CEO of the Canadian Gaming Association, returned to the podcast for a rapid-round conversation including the impact of the current turbulence around the Canadian political system on the gambling industry. The proroguing of Parliament by the Liberal Party will likely result in the demise of a couple of bills, and most likely push back once again attempts to modernize anti-money laundering laws. The current ones, said Burns, don’t address the creation of online gambling across the country.
Burns also answered our questions about the federal/provincial dynamics around sports betting and gaming in our home and native land. The CGA head honcho also helped us tee up next week’s ICE Barcelona conference, where he will meet with association members and global industry stakeholders in the first major gambling rendezvous of the new year.
Ariane Gauthier, the new spokesperson for the Quebec Online Gaming Coalition, made her maiden GNCS appearance to shine a brighter light on the op-ed she keyboarded in Le Journal de Montreal last week to make the coalition’s case for a regulated regime in La Belle Province. We asked Gauthier about the latest efforts by the coalition to meet with officials in the Francois Legault government at a time when it's dealing with major issues at home and the threat of harmful tariffs being imposed by U.S. president-elect Donald Trump when he takes office for the second time.
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There were some raises of Spockian eyebrows last week when Flutter Entertainment, the owners of FanDuel, announced an expected drop in revenue of some $370 million (Amarican bucks) thanks to its NFL customers getting the better of the books this season.
So, as the four-down football league’s postseason got underway with wild card weekend, Gaming News Canada Show regular Phill Gray – who led trading operations at Sports Interaction for more than two decades – rejoined the podcast. Gray and your humble host dug a little deeper into the reasons behind the bettors taking advantage of sportsbooks, and also looked ahead at the challenges and opportunities for the betting populace in the race to next month’s Super Bowl.
The 2024 U.S. presidential election and Justin Trudeau’s pending departure as leader of the Liberal Party here in our home and native land has reinvigorated wagering on politics, including in Ontario’s regulated gambling industry (as Dave Briggs reported in Friday’s newsletter). We asked Gray for his thoughts on that topic, too.
Finally, we took a quick peek at stories to watch in the sports betting space in 2025, including the odds of regulated gambling coming to Alberta, the crypto/betting story, and the potential impact around the growing popularity of women’s sports on sportsbook operators.
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There’s a full-out sprint across the sports industry these days when it comes to exploiting data, technology, and more recently, artificial intelligence.
Late last year, the founder/CEO of Sportradar, Carsten Koerl referred to the “global revolution” happening around sports analytics. The company’s senior vice-president of fan engagement, Patrick Mostboeck joined us from Austria for a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.
Mostboeck weighed in on several topics including:
Sportradar’s ongoing growth with its betting technology and solutions, and sports content, technology and services sectors.The company’s expanding relationship with the NBA to increase fan engagement globally through their exclusive data partnership.Riffing off an op-ed of sorts by Koerl on the Sportradar website back in October.The company’s evolving support of legal sportsbook operators in North America, and other parts of the world. That includes, on the eve of the start of the Australian Open, the introduction of micro markets for ATP matches.And, Sportradar’s partnerships with the NHL, men’s professional tennis tour (ATP) and NASCAR.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The next 12 months are expected to deliver continuing change when it comes to the business of sports, sports media, and of course, sports betting.
That was made clear on the first Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc. of 2025. Brian Cooper, the long-time Canadian sports sponsorship guru and current frequent board member – including chair of MKTG Canada, and Canada Basketball, and a member of the board of directors at NorthStar Gaming – and The Parleh co-founder/CEO Mark Silver were our guests for a lookahead edition of the podcast and covering a cornucopia of topics, including:
- What’s next for sports media in our home and native land from the reduction of journalists from newsrooms, to the continuing growth of podcasts, the increasing influence of “content creators” to the future of sports talk radio.
- Twenty-five years ago, then-Toronto Star sports media beat writer Chris Zelkovich reported on interest by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to acquire CTV SportsNet. With Rogers, owners today of Sportsnet, now controlling majority ownership of MLSE (one of the leading sports and entertainment entities on the planet, and with long-time sports broadcast executives Keith Pelley and Phil King now helping steer the good ship MLS and E), what does that mean for the future of Canadian sports and sports media?
- Speaking of MLSE, what’s next for Larry Tanenbaum, who continues to be a large presence on the Canadian sports scene and is bringing a WNBA franchise to Toronto?
- The partnership announcement on New Year’s Eve between the MLB Milwaukee Brewers and FanDuel Sports Network and court proceedings between MLB Players Inc., and DraftKings and bet365 highlight the ongoing investment by sportsbook operators in sports media and content.
- And, the still-evolving fragmentation of sports broadcast rights, including Netflix’s hugely successful partnership with the NFL on Christmas Day.
To cap off the podcast, host Steve McAllister asked Cooper and Silver for stories to watch in 2025 and received a couple of Spockian-eyebrow responses from the two veteran sports executives.
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Back in January, when we were still doing the LinkedIn Audio thing on Thursday afternoons, a Gaming News Canada Show panel covered a lot of real estate over 60 minutes.
Mitch Davidson, the chief of staff for iGaming Ontario, joined us to provide some thoughts on the best numbers yet from the regulated business of sports wagering and online gaming in iGO’s latest quarterly market performance report. Amanda Brewer and Phill Gray also hopped into that conversation, including a lookahead to 2024.
Parleh Media Group co-founder/CEO Mark Silver and Eric Herd – founder of A2Z Ventures and the former head honcho at The Post Game – weighed in on the departure of Erika Ayers Badans as CEO of Barstool Sports and The Action Network grand poobah Patrick Keane. We also asked Herd and Silver to analyze the potential acquisition of bankruptcy-bound Diamond Sports Group by Amazon.
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In early August iGaming Ontario let it be known that a joint bid by Integrity Compliance 360 and Australian company IXUP had been awarded the contract to develop a centralized self-exclusion system for Ontario’s regulated online sports betting and igaming marketplace.
Catherine Jarmain, the director of industry programs and monitoring for iGaming Ontario, and IC360 president Eric Frank joined the podcast to discuss the project to build on the existing player protections in Ontario – a program considered to be overdue by operators and others following the province’s legal gambling industry.
Both Jarmain and Frank also paid tribute to Martha Otton, a week after iGO announced that its executive director would be retiring at the end of the year. As Dave Briggs reported last week in the Gaming News Canada newsletter presented by GBG Plc, Otton’s departure is being delayed until March while her successor is found.
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On the roller-coaster that is the current state of sports media in North America, the folks at The GIST are among the ones enjoying the ride.
In October, “the revolutionary and inclusive sports media brand” announced it had reached one million subscribers across its various and sundry platforms. It’s most likely not a coincidence that the milestone was reached in a year highlighted by the overwhelming impact of basketball superstar Caitlin Clark on both the NCAA women’s hoops game, and the WNBA, along with a dominant performance by Canadian(including swimmer Summer McIntosh, who was a no-brainer choice to receive the Northern Star Award as the country’s athlete of the year) and American women at the Paris Olympics.
Ellen Hyslop, the co-founder and head of content for The GIST, made her maiden appearance on the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc to talk about the company’s evolution since its creation in 2017. She discussed with host Steve McAllister the “Caitlin Clark effect” - including Clark’s recent selection as TIME Magazine’s athlete of the year – the arrival of a North American women’s professional hockey league, and support of women’s sports from brands and corporations. Our conversation also included the appetite “GISTers” have for the NFL and other major professional sports.
Hyslop spoke with McAllister in July 2021 for a Toronto Star column about sports and sports betting, so we revisited that topic and the partnerships The GIST have had with sportsbook operators. Finally, she gave us a (tiny) glimpse into what GIST subscribers can expect in 2025.
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Eighteen years ago, a former Microsoft engineer was tuned in to the changing landscape of sports broadcasting rights and the opportunity to guide sports fans through the expanding maze.
That bit of prescience prompted Mark Phillip to create Are You Watching This?! which today provides real-time data for professional and U.S. college sports around the world. In 2019, after the overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) to legalize expanded sports betting in the U.S. of A., Phillip founded MetaBet to deliver sports wagering technology to media companies.
On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc, Phillip spoke with host Steve McAllister about the growth of both companies – and also his I Can’t Find The Game! brand – and both the challenges and opportunities in an ever-expanding media rights world that this season added NHL games on Prime Video in Canada, and speculation on what the NHL broadcasting landscape will look like in our home and native land when the Rogers deal expires in 2026.
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The latest shoe to drop on the current tempest around regulated gambling in North America happened yesterday when the U.S. Senate for the Judiciary announced a America’s High-Stakes Bet on Legalized Sports Gambling hearing for Tuesday, Dec. 16.
All of the ruckus south of the border around sports betting and online gaming, including the angst around problem gambling, sports betting advertising – which is also happening in our home and native land - daily fantasy sports, and sweepstakes has attracted the attention of elected officials, traditional media, mental health advocates and others. So, we welcomed back Chris Grove to lend his voice of reason to the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.
Grove, a co-founder of Acies Investments and partner emeritus at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, provided a plethora of measured insight on the current brouhaha, including:
· The interest in the industry from politicians and mainstream journalists should elicit more than a raised-eyebrow reaction from the industry;
· Some suggestions for industry stakeholders in responding to the scrutiny;
· The good work being done by the American Gaming Association – which recently added athlete harassment to its campaign around betting responsibly - to inform and educate folks on regulated gambling
· The industry needing to catch its collective breath on issues such as expanding legal online casino across the U.S.
Grove, the founder of Legal Sports Reports, discussed the challenges that journalists face in newsrooms and editorial departments that have shrunk in the U.S. and Canada. He also talked about the “Google effect” on gambling affiliates that led companies such as Catena Media to lay off journalists this fall (Dustin Gouker, in his Closing Line newsletter, created a spreadsheets of journalists available for hire). And he spoke about the potential impact of a second Donald Trump administration on the industry.
Finally, we asked the industry veteran about the current appetite for funding startups and his thoughts on the M&A landscape in 2024.
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The continuing rise in esports betting – expected to hit $2.5 billion (U.S.) in 2024 – and the partnership between Bet99 and PandaScore which was announced last week – prompted us to bring back Steven Salz to the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.
The founder and CEO of Rivalry, which cut its teeth at inception on esports wagering back in 2017, answered our questions about the still-growing engagement by fans and bettors around Fortnite, CounterStrike, Dota2, Valorant, etc. That conversation reminded us of our first encounter with Salz back in 2022 just after the opening of Ontario’s regulated sports betting and online gaming market, when he compared Rivalry with Wealthsimple and Robinhood when referring to its customer base.
So, that led us to get Salz’s thoughts on the recent rumbling about Robinhood contemplating a deeper dive into wagering in the aftermath of the U.S. election. He also addressed the growing popularity of crypto as the currency of choice among gamblers, including among the offshore casino industry, and Rivalry’s focus on accelerating its position as a “global, crypto-native operator”. (Salz reminded us that the AGCO’s rules around deposits in Ontario’s legal gambling business forbid the use of crypto).
Rivalry has undergone a major transformation in 2024 and Salz expanded on the company’s release of its latest financial results at the end of November. Finally, he gave us some parting thoughts about Ontario emerging as a good story for the company over the past year.
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While the snow was flying outside of Gaming News Canada HQ on the shores of Lake Huron earlier this week, your humble host fired up the virtual studio to welcome Dave Briggs, the former managing editor at Catena Editor and editor interim of the Gaming News Canada newsletter, for an unplugged/unvarnished/unfiltered episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.
Instead of opening up our notepads, Briggs and yours truly conversed on a number of topics about the business of sports betting and gaming, including:
Briggs’s tour of duty in journalism, the horse racing industry, and his time at Catena as editor-in-chief of Play Ontario/Play Canada, PlayPennsylvania, PlayIllinois and PlayMichigan; A fact sheet released this week by the World Health Organization on gambling, and the global impact of advertising and marketing on problem gambling;The layoffs involving journalists by gambling affiliates in 2024;The opportunities with the breakup of iGaming Ontario and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, and the call (once again) for both parties to be more transparent and also be voices for the regulated gaming industry in the province;Coverage of the industry by traditional media outlets since the Ontario regulated marketplace opened its doors in April 2022; What the province’s licensed operators – and the regulators - have done well, and what they could do better; And the motivation behind Briggs’s Fresh Waves podcast which features music you won’t hear on Top 40 radio.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Three days of arguments around the expanding of daily fantasy sports and online poker in Ontario’s regulated gambling industry were heard in the province’s court of appeal last week with a decision by the five-judge panel not expected until the new year. The legal beagles piled up the billable hours on behalf of their clients, including the Douglas Ford government, sports betting and gaming businesses, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, and the four provincial lottery and gaming entities that make up the Canadian Lottery Coalition.
Among the interested observers in the courthouse proceedings was Canadian Gaming Association senior advisor Amanda Brewer, who made her return to the latest episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc (welcome back to our presenting sponsor). Brewer provided her take on what she saw and heard last week and the scenarios that could play out once the panel reaches a decision.
We also asked Brewer for her thoughts on the continued debate around sports betting advertising in our home and native land, what’s news in Alberta (the province’s Minister of Red Tape Reduction last week took aim at Bodog), and iGaming Ontario’s search for a president and chief executive officer, who’s expected to move into Martha Otton’s chair some time in the first quarter of 2025.
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These are heady times for the British Columbia Lottery Corporation. Just weeks after hosting its annual New Horizons in Safer Gambling conference, BCLC was awarded the Best Flagship Responsible Gaming Award – Level 4 in Paris at the World Lottery Association’s annual global summit. So, we invited the corp’s director of player health, Ryan McCarthy to make his return to the Gaming News Canada Show.
McCarthy, who joined BCLC in August 2022, spoke about the recognition by the WLA, and his three key takeaways from the latest New Horizons conference. Highlighted was a keynote address by Dr. Shawn DuBravac on Gambling on the Safer Side: A Different Approach to Creating Competitive Advantage. He also dug into the continued changes around responsible gaming involving not only BCLC, but other provincial lottery and gaming corporations, operators, regulators and, of course, players. For BCLC, that includes its highly acclaimed GameSense initiative which is also used by operators including MGM Resorts and BetMGM.
Our conversation not surprisingly included a segment on artificial intelligence. We also asked McCarthy about the collaboration between player health advocates, revenue teams and others within BCLC to maintain balance between growing the business and prioritizing protecting customers.
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Sporttrade and its CEO are carving their own path through the sports betting business
This fall, New Jersey-based online sports wagering business Sporttrade announced the launch of its app in Virginia, the fifth U.S. state where the seven-year-old company is operating. Chief executive officer Alex Kane founded Sporttrade in 2017, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA).
Kane made his maiden appearance on the Gaming News Canada Show and told the story of the paralegal assistant who got into the sports betting and technology industry. He also explained the differences between the Sporttrade apps and other online sportsbooks, and the company’s deliberate strategy in building its business.
Kane also offered his thoughts on the existing regulated industry in Ontario, and the conversations he’s had with Jay Welbourn, the senior manager of technology and compliance for the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, about the province’s acclaimed competitive and legal gaming industry. And, of course, we prodded him for some thoughts and layers on the state of regulated gambling in the U.S. – included discussion in some states right now about adjusting the tax rates on legal gambling operators – and the soon-to-come regulated business in Alberta.
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