When the first sportsbooks started taking bets on the web in 1995, streaming video was a distant dream. Internet connections were not up to the task at that time, despite some companies such as RealMedia with their RealPlayer doing their best to force video down the minimal amount of bandwidth available on a dial-up line.
Today, you can get a connection of at least 512Kbps in almost any country – a massive improvement for sure, although several countries have gone much further – internet connections of up to 1GBps are both cheap and common in most areas of South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Live Streaming
Your connection speed is essential because your computer can only process information after it has received it. Some people buy new computers or other devices because their current one seems slow, only to discover that the problem was not their device, but their connection to the internet. The result is that the new device ends up being no faster than the old one – a colossal waste of money.
Sports betting sites began offering in-play betting a few years ago and quickly found that the feature was much more popular when they could stream video of the game via their website. This still isn’t possible with every sport due to licensing regulations. Still, Unibet, which operates a sports betting site in PA, is doing its best to access its customers as many games as possible.
If you find that video is lagging on your current machine, find out how much your internet provider charges for a faster connection, and shop around at the same time – see what other options are available in your area. If you tell your current ISP that you are leaving, they may offer you a faster connection as a way of retaining your customers.
Switching Devices
Way back in 1965, an engineer named Gordon Moore, who became the CEO of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years.
When you plot this prediction on a graph and compare it to the chips that have been produced since then, it turns out that this prediction was strangely accurate. We continue to see exponential growth in CPU power through multiple cores, better usage of power, and the shrinking of transistors from 250nm in 1996 to 5nm in 2020.
Anyone with an iPhone produced since 2020 or a high-end Android device such as the Galaxy S21 Ultra or Sony Xperia 1 Mark 3 holds a computer thousands of times more capable than a 486 PC from 1995.
This has led many to question whether they need a Windows PC at all – USB hubs allow keyboards and mice to be connected to tablets and smartphones, and casting your screen to a Smart TV has been expected for over a decade now. If everything you do with your device takes place in the web browser, you can save a lot of money by opting for a Chromebook rather than a Windows laptop or simply expanding your tablet with USB devices via a multi-port hub.
Better Payment Options
Online gambling is reaching every corner of the world, even countries with many “unbanked” citizens. These people want to place bets online, but how do they do this without a regular bank account?
The rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has caught many people off guard. Despite the banks and world governments claiming that these currencies are risky ways to use your money, they continue to increase in value over the long term.
In 2021, the average price for a single bitcoin has been $50,000. A year ago, the average value over the previous 12 months was $20,000, and the year before that, this number was around $7,000. This makes Bitcoin by far the best investment you could have made over the last few years, and it just so happens to be a great way to make bets at online sportsbooks, too.
You can purchase Bitcoin from an ATM-like machine using cash, which will then print you a voucher that you can scan with your phone to add the money to your wallet. Sometimes the value of Bitcoin can fluctuate wildly in a short period, which can be scary. Still, the currency has proved several times that if you wait long enough, it will eventually recover and turn into a healthy profit for the buyer.
If you are lucky, gambling with cryptocurrency is even more profitable than simply speculating on it by buying and holding it. The technology that underpins Bitcoin, known as the Blockchain, has been copied hundreds of times by other cryptocurrencies which try to steal some value away from Bitcoin or provide additional features.
Ethereum and Litecoin are two successful alternatives to Bitcoin that use similar technology with lower fees and faster times for completing a transaction. Many online sportsbooks now accept these payment methods, ideal for people in countries where online gambling with traditional payment methods is difficult or impossible.
Boosted Odds & Other Non-traditional Promotions
The traditional bonus model offered by online gambling companies has recently been overtaken by non-traditional promotions, such as boosted odds. Boosted odds are easy to understand – you get more money for the same bet than you would without the advertising.
Regular bonuses were getting truly out of hand – endless pages of terms and conditions with wagering requirements, maximum allowed bet sizes, and even rules regarding how often you could switch between different types of game were becoming commonplace, to the dismay of gamblers worldwide.
Thankfully, the online gambling companies have recognized that their promotions were becoming too complicated for the regular consumer they were targeting and have switched to alternative promotional methods instead – boosted odds, in particular, is a much simpler way of offering a deal to a new player than a typical sportsbook bonus with several pages of terms and conditions.
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