Prior to the Thursday night game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Green Bay Packers, the Philadelphia affiliate, Fox 29, launched a pre-game program dealing with sports betting. Consider it a portent of things to come.
Props and Locks expects to occupy half of the station’s usual 30-minute local pre-game show, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. The show features Fox 29 anchor Scott Grayson as host, former Eagles linebacker Garry Cobb as in-studio analyst and Fox Bet gambling expert Todd Fuhrman live via satellite from Las Vegas. Fuhrman, a mainstay on FS1’s daily studio show, Lock It In, brings an informed opinion on the state of sports wagering talking about odds and trends heading into the game.
Fox 29 Vice President and General Manager Dennis Bianchi said the genesis for the new program revolves around increasing interest from viewers and advertisers in sports betting, legal in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, both in casinos and sportsbooks as well as online.
“This is a new product category and we are always looking for a way to be effective with it,” Bianchi told the Journal. “And we think this type of program will be engaging for fans and generate new business.”
Props and Locks is sponsored by Fox Bet, a sports betting platform which debuted in New Jersey earlier this month by Fox Corp. In May, Fox Sports bought just under 5 percent of Canadian company The Stars Group, the parent of PokerStars and BetStars, for about $236 million. The Stars Group is licensed for internet gambling in New Jersey through an affiliation with Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.
This season marks the first in which bettors in Pennsylvania and New Jersey can bet on the NFL in person and online. Local radio, television, digital and print sports media outlets are lining up cash in. Late last month, iHeartMedia launched a third Philadelphia sports talk station, The Gambler. The new station is a mix of national Fox Sports Radio programming and an afternoon drive program hosted by Sean Brace called The Daily Ticket, which will center on sports betting.
In other news, Online Poker Report said Fox Sports Super 6, a new free-to-play sports prediction game, premiered this month. The app, part of the partnership between Fox Sports and The Stars Group, appears to be a success from the get go. It earned 280,000 downloads in the first week and is already the third-ranked trivia app in the iOS App Store.
The company has unsurprisingly taken inspiration from a similar product—also called Super 6—which Sky Betting and Gaming has run in the UK for years. TSG acquired Sky in a multi-billion-dollar deal last year.
Players have a chance to win up to $250,000 in a trio of weekly contests. Despite awarding cash prizes, Super 6 is not considered a gambling product because it doesn’t require any money from participants. It is therefore available to play throughout the U.S., minus Washington State.
The release came just days after Fox Bet went live in Pennsylvania, the second state in which the Fox-TSG sports betting platform is now available.
Sky’s version of Super 6 revolves around English Premier League soccer and asks player s to predict the exact scores of six matches each week. The jackpot triggers if one or more players get all six correct. Otherwise, the players who came the closest split a smaller consolation prize.
Fox Sports Super 6 is very similar, but with three contests per week. The Saturday and Sunday games use college football and NFL games respectively. Given the much greater range of likely results in football however, asking for an exact score would be too much. Players need only specify the winning team and margin of victory.
There is also a Thursday NFL contest that requires more predictions, like number of yards for a specific player or total points scored in the game.
The Stars Group reported there were 425,000 entries in the first week, so it seems likely the jackpot will hit every few months at worst.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the only states where Fox Bet is currently active, have a combined population of around 22 million residents. That’s less than seven percent of the US total. Add in the other states where online gambling is legal but TSG doesn’t yet have a license, and it’s still only a little over 15 percent.
Of the 280,000 people who downloaded Super 6 in the first week, then, it’s likely that fewer than 20,000 are legally able to register, deposit, and wager on Fox Bet right now.
The jackpot did not hit in the first week, but Fox Sports still paid out $65,000 in prizes. Add in the cost of developing, maintaining, and marketing the app, and it looks like an expensive proposition in terms of cost per acquisition.
Super 6 seems like a long-term strategy for the U.S. market. If it wasn’t, Fox Sports and TSG likely wouldn’t offer it nationwide. It’s a gamble, predicated on the assumption that many more states will legalize online sports betting in years to come.
While it’s probably true that less than 10 percent of Super 6 users are legally able to become Fox Bet customers right now, that number will likely increase many times over in the next few years. Establishing brand recognition and acquiring a database of future customers’ figures to pay off down the road.
That sort of proactive marketing is more or less a necessity given the competition that Fox Bet will face in new markets as they open.
