Sports Betting As Data Market

Big betting on sports requires second-by-second information about what’s happening during a game, and TV and radio operate on a five-to-ten-second delay. That’s why sports data gatherers are embedding themselves in sports arenas, especially at major events like the World Cup. They’re transmitting play-by-play bytes to big players in the betting industry, or to be posted directly online to betting sites where watching bidders are waiting to make financial decisions.

The legality of this kind of data gleaning is under debate. Football leagues have their own approved data streams that become valueless when circumvented by such schemes. And self-gathered data is hard to insure, protect, or verify. Or, as the author of this article on the topic asks:

“Does real-time data from a sporting event, like the sounds of a musical performance, have a claim to royalties and copyright protection for those who produce it? By creating a sort of monopoly, could a mandate for official data actually do more harm than good?”