February 8, 2011

Live Bingo: Experience the Real Thing

In an eGaming Review exclusive, David Briggs of INTRALOT gives us a sneak preview of the company‘s new Live Presenter Bingo product, soon to be launched in Italy. Combining live presenter interaction, extensive social gaming opportunities, and the future potential to fuse with real-life bingo, the product has the potential to create a fascinating hybrid of the online and offline bingo spaces.

eGR: INTRALOT is soon to launch Live Presenter Bingo to the European market, what made you chose Italy in particular as a point of entry?

David Briggs (DB): Italy was very much a natural choice for us, as INTRALOT is a licensed bookmaker within the country, across which we already have 600 retail betting licenses in place, as well as online licenses for sports betting, poker, and bingo. Our brand is now established in Italy, and although we have only been operating in Italy’s betting market for 3 years, we have already carved out about 6% of the general retail betting market share. Our ambition is to go on to match that in the Italian online space.

We are very keen to build on our current success by launching new products in the Italian interactive space in particular. Online bingo has only existed in Italy for a year, and yet its net worth has rocketed from zero back in December 2009 to an impressive E18m turnover per month in December 2010. It is a high growth market, but all the other operators effectively offer the same thing: a standard interface with limited community appeal. At INTRALOT we feel that innovation has been overlooked in the online bingo industry in recent years, and this is a great shame because the scope for new product development is still very real. We wanted to prove this point by launching a product in Italy which takes a product which many people see almost as a simplistic commodity – a standard online bingo game – and demonstrate that something new and exciting can be done with it. This not only shows the market that there is still room for innovation, but affords the customer a better experience, and is an all round win-win.

eGR: Having had a sneak-preview of the game, it is clear that the community aspect of online bingo is very much important to INTRALOT, what makes INTRALOT’s community offering unique?

DB: What makes our offering community unique is that players have the opportunity to interact both with their fellow players and the presenters. Our presenters have bags of character, and are keen to really interact with the players. Our site features online profiles of each presenter, and presenters also encourage customers to link up to them on Facebook. Players know when each presenter will be online, and the fact that they can actually see, hear and chat with the presenters really optimizes the potential of web 2.0 technologies in a way that rather than being gimmicky, actually provides a genuinely satisfying playing experience.

We have already seen that this factor has a huge influence in player satisfaction in that our figures show that customers play for longer and interact with the product better. Though we have not yet officially launched the Live Presenter Bingo product, our official marketing launch will occur in just over a fortnight’s time, we are already getting several hundred players a day visit the beta version of our game. The product has only been live for a week and we have not even emailed our customers to let them know about it, but they have found it naturally, and our numbers show that they keep coming back to the game and its community. This will prove to be a vital factor in increasing our market share, and in the future we hope to market our product to private companies and governments across the world.

eGR: What impact do you predict the launch of INTRALOT’s Live Presenter Bingo will have on the online gaming space?

DB: The unique advantages that Live Presenter Bingo offers, vastly enhance the experience of playing online bingo to the extent that I predict that within three years every online bingo operator will also offer a live product in tandem with their standard product. We are currently launching our Live Presenter Bingo product in Italy under our own brand in order to ensure that we have complete autonomy when it comes to when and how we innovate, but once the model is proven to be successful we will be looking to offer it to private and public operators and governments worldwide. INTRALOT is in the unique position of operating in more than 50 countries, including 13 US States, and has a retail betting presence in 14 countries worldwide. Our knowledge, expertise and global outreach put us in an ideal position to build on the success of Live Presenter Bingo in Italy, and market the product worldwide.

I also think we will see an increasing trend of offline operators extending into the online space, creating a highly profitable hybrid model.

eGR: What advantages could a move into online bingo hold for traditional offline bingo operators and government lotteries?

DB: One of the problems many bingo halls are facing is the need to cut staffing costs in order to remain profitable in these tough economic times, and many halls are cutting back on presenters, especially in Italy where the Bingo draws are o. en read out by a pre-recorded voice. This means that for most players there is actually more live interaction, and a more human feel to INTRALOT’s Live Presenter Bingo than there is in a bingo hall. In order to compete, bingo halls could move into the online space, and take advantage of this opportunity to build upon their existing operations. Liquidity can be a challenge for offline operators looking to move online with their own network, but there are ways around this problem. Bingo halls can team up, share presenters and share liquidity. At INTRALOT we’ve already teamed up with bricks and mortar bingo operators, and we are looking to team up with more.

I think that there is an interesting comparison to be drawn between the proliferation of online poker and the potential developments in the world of online bingo. I was personally involved in the launch of online poker to the European market in the early 2000s. At that time offline poker card rooms was almost dead on its feet in Europe, and many poker rooms were closing as they couldn’t make the economics work. The advent of online poker gave players an incredibly cheap way to play, and the subsequent explosion in poker went full circle and fed back into poker rooms, which enjoyed a revival. I see a clear analogy with Live Presenter Bingo, which might remind people of how much fun it was to see and hear a real-life presenter, and so allow for the greater synthesis of online and offline bingo. Online operators like INTRALOT could run bingo events in bingo halls and people could actually meet the presenters they have seen online. By the same token, offline operations could move into the hugely lucrative online space and maximize the potential of the brand they have already created. The online-offline hybrid, which technologies like 2.0 will facilitate, is a really interesting and exciting strategy which will take off in the year ahead.

For governments gambling can be seen as a way to benefit society by firstly establishing greater controls on betting and gaming, and secondly by putting the proceeds back into society. At INTRALOT we believe that our Live Presenter Bingo product supports the community and positive social aspects of bingo in a way that other models cannot. Live Presenter Bingo is not a solitary experience; it allows players to interact between themselves and with the presenters. We see Live Presenter Bingo as the future of online bingo, and one which will facilitate the synthesis of online and offline operations worldwide.