Hey Sports Tech Fans,
Happy New Year to you all!
Bumper edition this week as it has been a while since the newsletter was last out and with CES about to wrap up in Las Vegas there has been plenty of announcements, despite a noticeable drop in attendance this year due to Covid.
If you were at CES this year, it would be great to hear from you so send me an email if you were and have any sports tech insights to share.
Mobile betting is going live in New York from Saturday which is a great time to launch given that this weekend is Week 18 of the NFL regular season which will see the playoff picture finally set in stone.
My poor Vikings fell short of the playoffs, in part thanks to a defeat to main rivals the Green Bay Packers. But there’s always next season, right?
NFL is the main show in town when it comes to sports betting in the US so having a full month of betting action when the season enters its fever pitch will certainly be good for business.
There has been a lot of expectation on New York legalising gambling as there has been for California, which seems a ways away from having legal sports betting.
It will be interesting to see if New York legalising will result in neighbours New Jersey suffering from lower revenues.
The favourite for the Super Bowl title has changed hands many times throughout the season with the Green Bay Packers being current favourites.
We will have to get Emma backs from odds.com to give us a report on the first month of legal sports betting in NY next month.
2022 is seen by many as the year of The Metaverse.
We have been building to this future for a number of years now but there seems to be more and more of a groundswell behind the technology in the past two years.
2021 being a huge year for NFT’s, crypto gaming and land sales in metaverse worlds seemed to skyrocket in Q4 of the year.
There is a very interesting piece below from The Verge, but first reported by The Information that Meta, the company previously known as Facebook, have reportedly pulled the plug on the development of an operating system for their AR and VR headsets like the Quest.
This would be quite a setback for Meta as they are looking to break the hardware/software dominance of Apple of Google in the smartphone world.
Currently, the Quest operates on an android based kernel which has allowed them to develop the product to this point but ultimately Meta will want to control all aspects of the Metaverse from hardware, Operating System and even software applications and games that run on the device.
I still think we are quite a while away from the Metaverse being widely adopted as the vast majority of people are quite happy with their array of screens from tiny smartwatch screens, to phones, tablets, computers and ultimately the TV.
I expect 2022 to be a huge year for Metaverse investment and product launches but that will be a planting of the seeds that won’t come to fruition for a few years yet.
Have a great sporting weekend,
Will
