Bet365 upgrades mobile offering

One of the UK’s top online gambling operators, bet365, has upgraded its mobile gambling platform, introducing HTML5 technology to improve the feel and function of the platform, and reduce the code needed to produce it.

In an interview with the publication TechWorld this week, Alan Reed, head of the Systems Team at bet365, said that customer satisfaction had largely motivated the changes, which enable punters to watch live streams and place bets on the same screen.

Reed opined that HTML5 is much more interactive, allowing web developers to take advantage of new capabilities such as 3D graphics rendering and gesture control without the need for plug-ins.

Fifty percent of bet365’s customers now access the company’s services via a mobile device, and over the last six months, the company’s development team has been working with HTML5 to deliver a near-identical experience across all mobile devices, Reed revealed.

Audio and video streaming is now powered by HTML5, allowing customers on any device to access the streams, without the need for a flash plug-in. The same is also true of bet365’s Match Live service, which provides users with a graphical representation of a sport when a stream is not available.

“One of the problems with the streaming was we were never able to embed that in the same screen; the customer could only see one thing at one time,” Reed told TechWorld, “HTML5 has allowed us to embed the streams, so now we can give customers betting opportunities at the same time that we’re presenting them with real-time data.”

Reed says the HTML5 technology presents a variety of other benefits; it can now detect not only which device a customer is using, but also the screen size, the system capability, the geography and the type of connection, enabling the operator to better meet the needs of the punter.

Reed gave an example, saying that if a customer was connecting to the site via WiFi, the video stream would start automatically, but if they were connecting over 3G, the customer might want to conserve bandwidth so the video would not start until they clicked ‘play’.

“Critically, HTML5 is enabling the company to move away from an application-based development model – where separate versions have to be built for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and so on – to the creation of a universal product that can be accessed through a browser,” Reed said, adding that the app route inevitably leads to fragmentation, and can also require the services of specialist developers who understand how to get richness out of the native operating systems.

“This is a lot of effort given that bet365’s apps only account for 15 percent of mobile activity, the other 85 percent being HTML,” he said.