S
portsbook software and services provider Altenar has added not long ago a new feature for its sportsbook called Widgets.
Altenar CEO Stanislav Silin told SBC in an interview that the idea was born in discussions with Trustly, who drove the idea of In-banner Pay N Play for the Swedish market. “This is a special form of a widget which extends betting outside of where the sportsbook is published and delivers betting content to the player even before they have become a player with you,” he said.
Altenar sought to take this idea to other pieces of the content and build a full suite of such widgets. “We are probably not the first to do it, but we are doing it because the customers want it, we believe it works and it is a good technological evolution for our own architecture,” Silin noted.
He further explained that the product can be for affiliates if they want to package it as a banner, but it could also be to cross-sell areas within their own sites. For instance, customers that operate both a sportsbook and a casino can take a casino player and convert them into a sportsbook user by offering something a casino player would understand but within the casino pages of the site.
Operators are able to customize the widget with their own development resources, which gives them additional flexibility. “If our widgets need to support different layouts which cannot be achieved through pure style manipulation, that’s where we have to collect this feedback from operators. It’s a product that needs to evolve – it won’t be a one-off delivery and then everyone uses it,” Altenar CEO said. The capacity of detaching sportsbook content and offering it as standalone widgets allows the operator to mix sports content with other content and attract audiences in different ways in which they didn’t have the tools to do so before.
“If we have a full set of widgets that constitute a full sportsbook, only then might it be possible for the operator to build the entire user experience using widgets alone because then they get the entire journey for the punter. We don’t have all elements of widgets yet, but it is a potentially desirable outcome,” Silin concluded.