Australian Gambling – The future landscape of sports betting in Australia will be about product differentiation, leverage tech, scale, a heavy mobile and social focus and less ads – according to an industry keynote discussion held during last week’s 2014 Gaming, Racing and Wagering Australia conference.

The moderated Q&A session, hosted by representatives from Betfair, OnThePunt, the Northern Territory Department of Business, Sportsbet and Tabcorp, discussed new ways for sports betting operators to evolve their strategy with new forward-thinking business models.

Areas for improvement examined by the panel include continued refinement of existing platforms and their features like mobile smartphones and tablets, less red tape from gambling regulatory bodies regarding sports betting, and a consistent drive towards new wagering platforms and technologies such as wearable devices like Google Glass and virtual reality devices like Oculus Rift.

“The key here is if you do something special in digital, it’s only special for a short period of time,” executive manager of Tabcorp Doug Freeman said. “To remain on top, you’ve got to keep upgrading. Another competitive advantage for us is retail, and we need to digitalise retail – give punters a more digital experience.”

“Any product, any feature has to work across all devices,” Betfair strategy director Tim Moore-Barton stressed. “There are a couple of areas that still remain unexploited – mobile is still playing catch up in payment methods.”