Hot Star

How to play Hot Star

Marantelli says the London-based White Swan is a significant market maker on several secondary exchanges, accounting for as much as 40% of activity on some platforms. Its particular focus is the RFQ, parlay market.

“Just better margins,” he says of that decision. “I think it’s more defendable. It’s the area that fewer people can do well. So I think it’s more defendable margin, more ability to get long-term contracts and beneficial positions.”

Singles can be profitable, but parlay pricing requires the market maker to calculate the correlations between multiple outcomes and respond dynamically to individual requests. It is a skill set built over years in the sharper regions of the existing sports betting ecosystem.

How to play Hot Star

The objective, he argues, is to make it harder for operators to simply replace a blocked domain with another one. “If they knew there was a tool that would find those new sites as well, they might become more cautious.”

It is a philosophy that sits within a broader shift in the industry’s approach to the illegal market. Domain blocking remains important, but regulators are increasingly looking at payments, advertising, affiliate and acquisition channels and cooperation across jurisdictions.

For example, on the role of pirate sports streaming in driving traffic towards illegal gambling, while regulators in markets such as Turkey are confronting large-scale unlicensed activity. The more fragmented and technically sophisticated the illegal market becomes, the more important the intelligence behind enforcement is likely to become.

How to play Hot Star

Beyond offering crypto payment solutions, a number of black market operators are licensed in “light touch” offshore jurisidictions which use opaque offshore operating structures to help to obscure company ownership and make local enforcement against these companies complex, the report noted.

By comparison, the long tail of smaller black market sites rely heavily on affiliates to generate traffic.

Much of the onus for the increasing black market is put on increasingly restrictive policies enforced by regulators across the licensed sector.