Back in January, when we were still doing the LinkedIn Audio thing on Thursday afternoons, a Gaming News Canada Show panel covered a lot of real estate over 60 minutes.

Mitch Davidson, the chief of staff for iGaming Ontario, joined us to provide some thoughts on the best numbers yet from the regulated business of sports wagering and online gaming in iGO’s latest quarterly market performance report. Amanda Brewer and Phill Gray also hopped into that conversation, including a lookahead to 2024.

Parleh Media Group co-founder/CEO Mark Silver and Eric Herd – founder of A2Z Ventures and the former head honcho at The Post Game – weighed in on the departure of Erika Ayers Badans as CEO of Barstool Sports and The Action Network grand poobah Patrick Keane. We also asked Herd and Silver to analyze the potential acquisition of bankruptcy-bound Diamond Sports Group by Amazon.

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In early August iGaming Ontario let it be known that a joint bid by Integrity Compliance 360 and Australian company IXUP had been awarded the contract to develop a centralized self-exclusion system for Ontario’s regulated online sports betting and igaming marketplace.

Catherine Jarmain, the director of industry programs and monitoring for iGaming Ontario, and IC360 president Eric Frank joined the podcast to discuss the project to build on the existing player protections in Ontario – a program considered to be overdue by operators and others following the province’s legal gambling industry.

Both Jarmain and Frank also paid tribute to Martha Otton, a week after iGO announced that its executive director would be retiring at the end of the year. As Dave Briggs reported last week in the Gaming News Canada newsletter presented by GBG Plc, Otton’s departure is being delayed until March while her successor is found.

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On the roller-coaster that is the current state of sports media in North America, the folks at The GIST are among the ones enjoying the ride.

In October, “the revolutionary and inclusive sports media brand” announced it had reached one million subscribers across its various and sundry platforms. It’s most likely not a coincidence that the milestone was reached in a year highlighted by the overwhelming impact of basketball superstar Caitlin Clark on both the NCAA women’s hoops game, and the WNBA, along with a dominant performance by Canadian(including swimmer Summer McIntosh, who was a no-brainer choice to receive the Northern Star Award as the country’s athlete of the year) and American women at the Paris Olympics.

Ellen Hyslop, the co-founder and head of content for The GIST, made her maiden appearance on the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc to talk about the company’s evolution since its creation in 2017. She discussed with host Steve McAllister the “Caitlin Clark effect” - including Clark’s recent selection as TIME Magazine’s athlete of the year – the arrival of a North American women’s professional hockey league, and support of women’s sports from brands and corporations. Our conversation also included the appetite “GISTers” have for the NFL and other major professional sports.

Hyslop spoke with McAllister in July 2021 for a Toronto Star column about sports and sports betting, so we revisited that topic and the partnerships The GIST have had with sportsbook operators. Finally, she gave us a (tiny) glimpse into what GIST subscribers can expect in 2025.

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Eighteen years ago, a former Microsoft engineer was tuned in to the changing landscape of sports broadcasting rights and the opportunity to guide sports fans through the expanding maze.

That bit of prescience prompted Mark Phillip to create Are You Watching This?! which today provides real-time data for professional and U.S. college sports around the world. In 2019, after the overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) to legalize expanded sports betting in the U.S. of A., Phillip founded MetaBet to deliver sports wagering technology to media companies.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc, Phillip spoke with host Steve McAllister about the growth of both companies – and also his I Can’t Find The Game! brand – and both the challenges and opportunities in an ever-expanding media rights world that this season added NHL games on Prime Video in Canada, and speculation on what the NHL broadcasting landscape will look like in our home and native land when the Rogers deal expires in 2026.

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The latest shoe to drop on the current tempest around regulated gambling in North America happened yesterday when the U.S. Senate for the Judiciary announced a America’s High-Stakes Bet on Legalized Sports Gambling hearing for Tuesday, Dec. 16.

All of the ruckus south of the border around sports betting and online gaming, including the angst around problem gambling, sports betting advertising – which is also happening in our home and native land - daily fantasy sports, and sweepstakes has attracted the attention of elected officials, traditional media, mental health advocates and others. So, we welcomed back Chris Grove to lend his voice of reason to the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.

Grove, a co-founder of Acies Investments and partner emeritus at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, provided a plethora of measured insight on the current brouhaha, including:

· The interest in the industry from politicians and mainstream journalists should elicit more than a raised-eyebrow reaction from the industry;

· Some suggestions for industry stakeholders in responding to the scrutiny;

· The good work being done by the American Gaming Association – which recently added athlete harassment to its campaign around betting responsibly - to inform and educate folks on regulated gambling

· The industry needing to catch its collective breath on issues such as expanding legal online casino across the U.S.

Grove, the founder of Legal Sports Reports, discussed the challenges that journalists face in newsrooms and editorial departments that have shrunk in the U.S. and Canada. He also talked about the “Google effect” on gambling affiliates that led companies such as Catena Media to lay off journalists this fall (Dustin Gouker, in his Closing Line newsletter, created a spreadsheets of journalists available for hire). And he spoke about the potential impact of a second Donald Trump administration on the industry.

Finally, we asked the industry veteran about the current appetite for funding startups and his thoughts on the M&A landscape in 2024.

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The continuing rise in esports betting – expected to hit $2.5 billion (U.S.) in 2024 – and the partnership between Bet99 and PandaScore which was announced last week – prompted us to bring back Steven Salz to the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.

The founder and CEO of Rivalry, which cut its teeth at inception on esports wagering back in 2017, answered our questions about the still-growing engagement by fans and bettors around Fortnite, CounterStrike, Dota2, Valorant, etc. That conversation reminded us of our first encounter with Salz back in 2022 just after the opening of Ontario’s regulated sports betting and online gaming market, when he compared Rivalry with Wealthsimple and Robinhood when referring to its customer base.

So, that led us to get Salz’s thoughts on the recent rumbling about Robinhood contemplating a deeper dive into wagering in the aftermath of the U.S. election. He also addressed the growing popularity of crypto as the currency of choice among gamblers, including among the offshore casino industry, and Rivalry’s focus on accelerating its position as a “global, crypto-native operator”. (Salz reminded us that the AGCO’s rules around deposits in Ontario’s legal gambling business forbid the use of crypto).

Rivalry has undergone a major transformation in 2024 and Salz expanded on the company’s release of its latest financial results at the end of November. Finally, he gave us some parting thoughts about Ontario emerging as a good story for the company over the past year.

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While the snow was flying outside of Gaming News Canada HQ on the shores of Lake Huron earlier this week, your humble host fired up the virtual studio to welcome Dave Briggs, the former managing editor at Catena Editor and editor interim of the Gaming News Canada newsletter, for an unplugged/unvarnished/unfiltered episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc.

Instead of opening up our notepads, Briggs and yours truly conversed on a number of topics about the business of sports betting and gaming, including:

• Briggs’s tour of duty in journalism, the horse racing industry, and his time at Catena as editor-in-chief of Play Ontario/Play Canada, PlayPennsylvania, PlayIllinois and PlayMichigan; 
• A fact sheet released this week by the World Health Organization on gambling, and the global impact of advertising and marketing on problem gambling;
• The layoffs involving journalists by gambling affiliates in 2024;
• The opportunities with the breakup of iGaming Ontario and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, and the call (once again) for both parties to be more transparent and also be voices for the regulated gaming industry in the province;
• Coverage of the industry by traditional media outlets since the Ontario regulated marketplace opened its doors in April 2022; 
• What the province’s licensed operators – and the regulators - have done well, and what they could do better; 
• And the motivation behind Briggs’s Fresh Waves podcast which features music you won’t hear on Top 40 radio.

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Three days of arguments around the expanding of daily fantasy sports and online poker in Ontario’s regulated gambling industry were heard in the province’s court of appeal last week with a decision by the five-judge panel not expected until the new year. The legal beagles piled up the billable hours on behalf of their clients, including the Douglas Ford government, sports betting and gaming businesses, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, and the four provincial lottery and gaming entities that make up the Canadian Lottery Coalition.

Among the interested observers in the courthouse proceedings was Canadian Gaming Association senior advisor Amanda Brewer, who made her return to the latest episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by GBG Plc (welcome back to our presenting sponsor). Brewer provided her take on what she saw and heard last week and the scenarios that could play out once the panel reaches a decision.

We also asked Brewer for her thoughts on the continued debate around sports betting advertising in our home and native land, what’s news in Alberta (the province’s Minister of Red Tape Reduction last week took aim at Bodog), and iGaming Ontario’s search for a president and chief executive officer, who’s expected to move into Martha Otton’s chair some time in the first quarter of 2025.

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These are heady times for the British Columbia Lottery Corporation. Just weeks after hosting its annual New Horizons in Safer Gambling conference, BCLC was awarded the Best Flagship Responsible Gaming Award – Level 4 in Paris at the World Lottery Association’s annual global summit. So, we invited the corp’s director of player health, Ryan McCarthy to make his return to the Gaming News Canada Show.

McCarthy, who joined BCLC in August 2022, spoke about the recognition by the WLA, and his three key takeaways from the latest New Horizons conference. Highlighted was a keynote address by Dr. Shawn DuBravac on Gambling on the Safer Side: A Different Approach to Creating Competitive Advantage. He also dug into the continued changes around responsible gaming involving not only BCLC, but other provincial lottery and gaming corporations, operators, regulators and, of course, players. For BCLC, that includes its highly acclaimed GameSense initiative which is also used by operators including MGM Resorts and BetMGM. 

Our conversation not surprisingly included a segment on artificial intelligence. We also asked McCarthy about the collaboration between player health advocates, revenue teams and others within BCLC to maintain balance between growing the business and prioritizing protecting customers. 

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Sporttrade and its CEO are carving their own path through the sports betting business

This fall, New Jersey-based online sports wagering business Sporttrade announced the launch of its app in Virginia, the fifth U.S. state where the seven-year-old company is operating. Chief executive officer Alex Kane founded Sporttrade in 2017, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA).

Kane made his maiden appearance on the Gaming News Canada Show and told the story of the paralegal assistant who got into the sports betting and technology industry. He also explained the differences between the Sporttrade apps and other online sportsbooks, and the company’s deliberate strategy in building its business.

Kane also offered his thoughts on the existing regulated industry in Ontario, and the conversations he’s had with Jay Welbourn, the senior manager of technology and compliance for the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, about the province’s acclaimed competitive and legal gaming industry. And, of course, we prodded him for some thoughts and layers on the state of regulated gambling in the U.S. – included discussion in some states right now about adjusting the tax rates on legal gambling operators – and the soon-to-come regulated business in Alberta.

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