Brian MacSweeney podcast transcript

Interview with Brian MacSweeney

Speaker key:
RT: Ronan Tighe
BM: Brian MacSweeney

RT: Hi, I’m Ronan Tighe, and welcome to Podcast 9 in our Innovations series. This week I’m joined by Brian MacSweeney from Boolabus. Brian, thanks for agreeing to do the podcast.

BM: Pleasure to be here.

RT: I think we should start off by you telling us a little bit about your background and Boolabus.

BM: Well, my background’s in product development, I worked for BSkyB on the first interactive TV services, I worked at Littlewoods for a while, but essentially have always been in and around interactive television, new product development or new platforms. I started getting into gaming when I was working at Sky, and after I had left Littlewoods, I went to a company called Victoria Real, who Endemol bought. They were a digital agency, they had a couple of clients in gaming, and we just started building up a specialist gaming team there, and that evolved into Endemol Gaming, which we created about three or four years ago, and there was pretty much a whirlwind of activity within that company around Deal or No Deal, various other things there. So it’s pretty much been focused on products across sports, poker, casino games, and about a year ago I left to form Boolabus, and that’s my own company that’s focused on live betting and live gaming.

RT: And is that the kind of current area of gaming that you’re particularly interested in?

BM: Yes, that is it, it was an area that we’d always been active in at Endemol, and it was the most interesting to me, and I think just essentially live betting and live gaming really were the only form of interactive entertainment where you’ve got real time connections, so whether it’s around a live sports event or around a multi-player game where people are interacting, that’s the kind of focus, sometimes there’s live video involved, but there’s something about that whole area that I think is worth focusing on.

RT:First of all, what do you think the current experience is like for users? And who’s doing it best?

BM: The experience is very varied, and there’s different schools of thought as to what that experience should be, but I think a general trend that you can’t argue with is that betting has gone from a pure transactional, a list of prices, a list of selections, you place your bet, they take your money, you leave it, and it’s moving towards much more of an immersive entertainment experience, where actually you come to the website and you’ll hang out for a while, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff there, and there’s a lot of different events going on, and it’s very much about the experience, rather than just a straight financial transaction, so that trend continues to move in that direction.

So, in terms of what’s out there now, I think it really depends on how you look at it, for the breadth of coverage I think Betfair through their exchange enable you to bet live on just a vast array of events and markets, and that’s pretty attractive, whatever way it’s packaged. Bet365 always gets referenced by bookmakers and by people in the industry, and I think it’s something to do with the simplicity, but they’re also very fast movers, they’ve got video integrated, but it’s just a nice, well-rounded, simple application. And then I’d be guilty of being a little bit biased, but Sportingbet, which is one of our own applications, I like it because I think it’s got the best integration of live video out there, and they’re a fairly ambitious company, we’ve started to do things such as settlement fees, so you’re telling punters that their money is back in the account, and trying to just really inform them, and not make it hard work for them to dig down through account history pages. So I think Sportingbet generally is a good experience and the results, the application has delivered on its promise in terms of what we did there. But it’s a very interesting, busy area with lots of development.

The one I didn’t mention is Bewin, Bewin have done a phenomenal job on product development, and there was a criticism maybe about six months ago, before they launched their new live betting experience, that it was too sophisticated, and actually was almost intimidating, but in what they’ve done more recently, it’s impressive by any standards.

RT: And what enhancements do you think we’re going to see in the live betting sector in the next year, and then maybe going forward, slightly longer?

BM: Again, this is probably a few things. I think the rise and rise of online video will continue apace, and I think at the moment there’s a lot of various bookmakers will have horseracing video from one source, they’ll have maybe 4,000 events from Perform Group, they’ll have a couple of other exclusives they might buy in. I think we’ll probably see – there’s a continuing demand in video, I get called once a week about, where can I get live video? – but there’s a limit in terms of the number of licences, so I think we’ll probably see bookmakers focusing a little bit on how they position video within their website, at the moment it’s a bit of a bolt on and an add on, so we’ll start to see things such as Ladbrokes TV, where they’re trying to create a brand, and probably a destination, so that essentially you can come in and hit that site, and just the way you check any PG on Sky – what’s on, what’s on in the next five minutes? – just let me see it. So the way they organise that information will definitely improve, and I think a lot of bookmaker sites will become very video-centric.

I think there’s another phenomenon within sports betting and live betting that’s to do with outsourcing and the automation of markets. Bookmakers and punters alike, they like to cover a lot of events, and when there’s an event on they like to offer as many markets as possible, and I think that the ability to do that, it’s not possible for say small to medium-sized bookmakers to run a trading team that can generate that amount of activity and market, so companies such as Betgenius who offer automated trading solutions, that’s driving a lot of business as well, and really increasing bookmakers’ ability to offer more and more live betting, and what comes out of that as well are real time data streams from those same data sources, and so we’ll probably see a lot more content integration in live betting, and it’s something that we’re looking at in terms of getting real time data with your end content and video and your odds, and really mixing it up together, everything’s really been stuck in a pop up, as it were, up until now. So it’s that kind of just pulling the content into where the users want it, we’ll see a lot more of that, and consolidative experiences.

RT: And do you think that consolidation with content and video and the actual betting process is going to change the way people are betting?

BM: Definitely, and you see it already, the length of, the average spend per session, might go up a bit, if people enjoy it more, they’ll bet on a wider range of markets, they might bet smaller stakes and spread more, but without a doubt video will drive, I think, between three and five times the volume of betting. If it’s on TV, it’s about 20 times the volume of an event that isn’t on television, so there’s a kind of natural jump there, if you can see it and experience it, you may get interested and want to bet on it. So content is a key driver, and I think there will never be streaming video for the three o’clock Premiership games, so what we focus on is, it’s not all about video, what can you do there? What can data and audio achieve, and you achieve that same TV effect, that same kind of uplift? But yes, the experience is critical, and can really drive significant multiples in terms of turnover, it works.

RT: Looking back on your time in the industry, what do you think have the biggest innovations been, and in particular what projects have you been working on that you think have been the most innovative?

BM: God, some of them never made it! In terms of the industry, you have to mention Betfair, they’ve come out of nowhere, and enough has been said about them, enough articles have been written about them praising them, but I think what’s worth noting about Betfair is their continual innovation, and that they invest and spend money on trying to uncover what’s wrong with their site, what would be a good product, they talk to their audience really actively, and so on, so I think while Betfair may be a complex exchange, and only one in six people can use it, and so on, that’s not going to last forever, I’m sure they’ll continue to innovate and create a great experience for the mass market there, so they’re always a threat to every other bookmaker, they’re pretty good.

Within the kind of live gaming streaming, there’s probably, I think the original one many years ago was Avago, which was TV bingo, and it created, it’s still kind of referenced, and I’m not sure whether it’s actually been improved on since then, but they just sat on Sky, on channel 800 or whatever, it was just playalong bingo, and they’d mention your name on television – that really just opened up a lot of people’s imaginations as to what could be done when you take gaming into a more entertainment area. Another company within that, Evolution, who you’ve had on your series as well, they’ve taken live streaming, live gaming, they’ve innovated, they’ve been at that for years, but actually they’ve taken that product out to pretty much every bookmaker and every gaming company who are worth going to, and it’s a phenomenal product. So those two companies, certainly in terms of product innovation and ideas, Avago no longer exists, it got sucked in to who knows where.

The other company, I suppose, Jackpot Joy have been a company I’ve admired all along, and what they do within probably marketing, but also in product development in terms of multi-player games, they take big brands like The Price is Right, and try and create The Price is Right bingo; they’ve got other offerings that are out there now that are Team Bingo, and so on, so they’re really trying to nail the social gaming angle, and their marketing and their CRM is just phenomenal. So they’re the companies that jump to mind when I think about innovations.

In terms of projects, things I’ve worked on, I’d say the current ones which I’m currently working on, and genuinely believe that, but of course I won’t start talking about them until they’re finished. Within the live betting area, we did Ladbrokes, the original live betting application, about six years ago, and it didn’t exist, so we had to design it from first principles, and it still, there’s an update we did about four years ago, and it set the template at the time, and it’s really simple, and I think that’s what I like about it, and at the time it had a phenomenal effect, and there’s many imitators, and even Bet365′s application, they all follow the same kind of template, but at the time that was quite an interesting project, as we had to just work through and get it down to something without any reference points, and there was a great payoff for Ladbrokes.

RT: In terms of the projects that you’ve done, what’s been the biggest challenge – is there any common things that you’re faced with, so every project is always the same challenges? – or is it different every time?

BM: The one that is the overarching one is making something feel familiar and simple when you launch it, and the day you show it to the client and you launch it, and they go, “Is that it? – anybody could do that”, because they instantly look at it, and they know how it works, and they know what they have to do, and that’s just a great feeling when someone says that, so that’s actually, we’re always trying to strive for that simplicity and familiarity, and if there’s conventions out there, we’ll use them; if someone’s done something really well, and it’s across several websites, and punters who are on your site are probably using it and doing it that way, well let’s not break it, but at the same time we’re doing fairly complex applications now that have video data, audio, and of course they’re going to look more complex, you’ve a lot more in there, there’s more configuration and choices, so we spend a lot of our time just trying to distil those things out, hide them, make it simpler, and just remove stuff off screen. So that’s the big challenge, not to put something in front of a customer who’s just going to go, “I’m not smart enough for this.”

RT: As a B2B provider, do you sometimes find it frustrating that you’re not able to control the full experience that the user sees of your product?
BM: Yeah, because we do, a lot of what we do are I suppose rich internet applications that get dropped in to various points in the website, and so we do our best within that, and we’ll have plenty of opinions about the rest of the website, or the process, and we’re not afraid to say them, but we know what the scope of our project is. I think on the whole though, certainly the clients I love working with in sports betting, people are open to listen and so on, and generally they want to do everything, they want to listen and they want to improve the experience, but it comes down to normally restrictions in IT resource and technical issues, and that’s really held back sports betting in a way, the abilities of the platforms, they’re powerful platforms in their own right, but I think the front end, the content management and the kind of web publishing side is probably not up to the same standard that you’d have in other sectors, so that whole user experience, they need to be able to do more, they need to be able to control it more, and I think some of the companies that have control of that, and potentially own their own platforms, have the ability to go and do their own thing and innovate on demand, but I think it’s not because they don’t want to improve the experience generally, so you can’t get frustrated, it’s really because the resources say, shall we launch that new product? – that means direct revenue streams, or should we improve this section of the website that may or may not, and it’s normally, you know which way the decision’s going to go, and it’s one of those type of decisions.

RT: So do you think at the moment that gaming sites are currently competing on the basis of innovation and experience?

BM: They haven’t been, but I think they are now are about to. There’s a few exceptions, but I think there’s been, let’s just say the last ten years has been, I won’t say easy money, but we’ve had, poker came along, it was like, brilliant! – let’s get poker out, and let’s create landbased tournaments, and there was always a new wave of growth, and that was the prime focus, so I think during that time, things like Sportsbooks might have got a little bit neglected. So innovation and product development and customer experiences hasn’t necessarily been at the top of the agenda, it’s more about new product, expansion, territories – just take the core of what we have, the poker, casino, sports, and let’s just get it out there and get our affiliates sorted out, and all of that kind of thing. But I think that’s about to shift now, I think there’s no easy wins, there’s no magic product coming along in the next year or two, so it’s time to make them work harder, maybe use your own in house product development team to try and come up with some unique ideas that your customers aren’t going to get automatically, which is a problem when you all have the same suppliers, so I think it’s going into an era of innovation and product development, and a lot of that is to do with just what’s happening in the wider web, so I think the next ten years could be fun, the last ten though have been very much about just consolidating and getting the product up there.

RT: What are your predictions for how the industry’s going to change in the near future?

BM: Let’s see … probably the big trend that everyone’s talking about, but scratching their heads as to how to make it work, is the kind of socialisation of gaming and betting. Everyone’s aware of what’s going on on Facebook, that Zinger have 20,000 players playing poker at any one time on Facebook, and so forth; Playfish are doing phenomenal things and have user numbers that have gone through the roof, so it’s looking at all those kind of phenomena, and realising that, if we do let people connect in some way, it is quite a powerful thing. There’s a lot of products and start ups and ideas knocking around in that area, so I certainly don’t claim to have figured that one out, but it has to be a huge driver in gaming. Fundamentally, if you want to watch a football game, a good place to watch it is in a pub or in a stadium, or in a shared communal experience, and that is quite a powerful thing, so I think distilling that essence, and making it come across somehow on your website, has to be a big driver for the future.

And the other one is mobile, it’s been talked about for so many years, but just finally we’ve got some smartphones, we’ve had a lead from Apple that pretty much told everyone else how to make things work well, and fundamentally I think mobile gaming, gambling, whatever you want to call it, it’ll be half of all gambling, and 50% of gambling within, who knows? – three, four, five years, I think, I’d be fairly bullish on that, but the industry as a whole is fairly pessimistic about mobile, I think, at this stage, because it just hasn’t happened, and it just doesn’t really stack up. So I think mobile will eventually come out of the doldrums and pick up, but again it’s just another screen, another device, so really we all carry on doing the same things on big screens and small screens, but we’ll probably do it in a more connected, friendly way, and share it a little bit and so forth, so it’s how to make money out of it – that’s the killer.

RT: Brian, we’ll leave it there, thank you very much for your time, and it was great having you on the podcast, and best of luck in the future.

BM: Cheers, thank you very much for having me.

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