New American Football League Counts Built On Betting App

Will the next play be a run or a pass? A first down or a touchdown?

The new Alliance of American Football league, which kicked off this month, is counting on technology that will enable in-game betting on quicker, shorter plays through an application on mobile phones.

“It’s not fully functional, but it’s almost there,” said Scott Butera, President of Interactive Gaming at MGM, which has an exclusive license for AAF’s sports gambling technology.

He told USA Today: “What it will do, which is very important to us from a sports betting standpoint, is it will allow almost immediate transmission of data and what’s going on in an event to your mobile device, which will allow us to have play-by-play gambling, which is non-existent today.”

Critical for MGM is eliminating “latency” between what happens at the live event and the time gamblers see it streaming on their phones. Butera said that in the early games of the new league the streaming app was actually showing live action well before television – and doing so by more than a play!

AAF players are  wearing technology gathering data to facilitate automated instant betting odds for next-play bets.

AAF CEO and co-founder Charlie Ebersol told the newspaper that this helps the technology’s “predictive casting,” using historical data, plus play formation data, including which players are on the field at the moment.

Besides next-play betting, other in-game betting with longer action windows are expected to be a big part of the gambling business, such as how a team might end its offensive possession.

Butera said other types of in-game betting for AAF games through MGM are only operational right now in Nevada and awaiting review in New Jersey.

“The viewership was better than expected,” Butera said. “The attendance was better than expected, and the betting volumes were better than expected. There was a lot of in-game betting, too, which means the next generation is really following it.”