Wednesday December 4, 2013 : MOBILE GAMBLING SET TO BOOM OVER NEXT FIVE YEARS
User numbers will rise by 100 million, says respected research firm.
Hold on to your hats – the mobile gambling business is set to boom in the next five years with 100 million punters using the mobile channel.
So says the respected UK research company Juniper Research in its latest predictions on industry development.
The company predicts that over the next five years, the number of mobile and/or tablet owners using their devices to gamble will increase by 100 million, meaning that 164 million people will either place a bet, visit a mobile casino or buy a lottery ticket on their device in 2018.
And Juniper says the strongest growth will come from the North American market.
According to the report "Mobile Gambling: Casinos, Lotteries and Betting 2013-2018," although growth has been slow in the US since the Department of Justice policy switch on the Wire Act in 2011, the number of users in the region is expected to pick up sharply from 2014 onwards.
This will occur as states which have not yet fully legislated on remote gambling make progress following successful services launching in Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey.
In addition, inter-state poker, where two players in separate, regulated markets play against each other, is likely to become a reality in the medium term, the researchers claim.
The report notes that the majority of these new mobile users would be switching to mobile gambling from desktop services. It attributes this migration to the fact that many features of gambling work better on a mobile device than a PC. For example, in-play betting on a mobile device does not disrupt a user's experience when watching a live sports match, and dual-screen options on tablet casino games can enhance gameplay.
Report author Siân Rowlands observes that "…mobile can frequently provide a more immersive and convenient gambling experience than a desktop PC or laptop. As a result of this, gambling operators have been required to shift the nature of their organisation away from ‘legacy' services such as telephone betting towards becoming a more mobile-oriented company, with the aim of achieving over half of their online revenues from mobile in the next 1-3 years."