16th December 2011, Stoke based eGaming operator bet365 has today announced the launch of its multi-platform mobile video streaming product.

Users can now watch and bet on live sports events via their iOS and Android powered smartphones. bet365 expects to deliver thousands of sporting events over the next year, including soccer, tennis, basketball, squash, snooker, darts, cricket and horseracing.

“We are taking mobile computing very seriously,” said Martin Davies, CTO, bet365. “There’s a similar excitement as 10 years ago, when we started to explore the full potential of the Internet.”

He continued, “Our software development teams have cracked a number of difficult technology challenges to enable us to be one of the first companies to offer a video streaming service across multiple mobile platforms. As connection speeds still need to catch up, we have designed our product to identify what speed the user is on and deliver the best experience that their phone will allow.” 

The company has stolen a march on competitors by leveraging the systems and code it developed for its online In-Play system. The raw video streams have been supplied by Perform, which are then integrated into the bet365 system by their in-house development team.

“Mobile phones are less challenging than computers because everything is optimised for one size of screen. That means that we can focus on the performance and speed of delivery rather than rendering for different screen sizes,” said Davies.

In October, the company began streaming live video coverage of horse racing on iPhones, which has proven very popular. The All Sports service will deliver around 3,400 sporting events and 10,000 horse races.

bet365 expects to roll out further developments in 2012 with a service that has been designed specifically for tablets.