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00:00Okay, now let's move over to, so that was the bright side of sports betting.
00:06Maybe this is not so much, but not surprising here, I guess.
00:09Maybe from a technology point of view, I did not expect to read this story over on Legal
00:14Sports Report about ESPN bet and in terms of some of the technology as far as how they're
00:20being run, not ranked particularly high, especially among sports books that are run by a company
00:25called Canby that's extremely popular and by all accounts doing very well.
00:28So let's dive into this.
00:30What's going on here?
00:31Yeah, so a little bit of background on this, Craig.
00:34If you remember Penn last year when they were still partnered with Barstool, they migrated
00:39their tech from Canby, a third party tech supplier, to their own in-house tech over
00:44the MLB All-Star break and they said that this was going just to be overall better in
00:50the long run for Penn and Barstool at the time.
00:53They then shifted not too long after that to ESPN bet and they kind of restarted the
00:58whole process here and we have Eilers and Krajic.
01:01They are an analysis firm in the gaming industry that they do a fantastic job.
01:07Their research is very expensive to get your hands on, but it's worth it and they have
01:11a team of testers that look at all of the apps and this was their first half rankings
01:17and ESPN bet came in at number 11th and that's kind of a kick in the rear when you consider
01:25that BetRivers at number 8 uses Canby and BetJack, it's a localized Ohio brand on Canby,
01:34they both performed better than ESPN bet.
01:37That is not great for Penn Entertainment right now.
01:43More not great news has come out.
01:45They've been downgraded to neutral instead of buy from Bank of America today based on
01:53ESPN bet and how it is dragging down the earnings of the overall company.
01:57Penn has a fantastic retail sports, excuse me, casino business across the US.
02:05These regional casinos do great business for them, but the overhang for years now has been
02:11sports betting and their interactive investments and there's just no, we don't see that
02:19ending for ESPN bet right now.
02:21They're going to have to invest more to get more customers to hit those marks that Disney
02:27wants to see to keep the partnership going.
02:29And I thought it was telling this morning from Flutter CEO, Peter Jackson, talking about
02:39the promotional activity in the US and whether it's rational or people are outspending.
02:43And he said, quote, we're not seeing people spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to
02:47persuade customers to try out a product, which isn't very good.
02:52That felt pretty targeted at ESPN bet.
02:56And so we're just going to have to see what Penn does moving forward to get ESPN bet up to
03:02speed. We know that they're working on parlays.
03:05We know that they want that parlay product to be deeper overall.
03:09They feel like that's where they're losing out the customers because they CEO, Jay Snowden
03:14of Penn Entertainment is saying, you know, the customers are there, we're just not getting
03:18enough of their wallet share, we're just not doing this or doing that.
03:21And at the end of the day, he's putting it all on better parlay depth to get the product
03:28similar to what DraftKings and FanDuel have and also getting the integration, working
03:33with the ESPN app and seeing what that can do there.
03:36Because remember, we've seen surveys showing that people that frequent the ESPN app would
03:43switch to ESPN bet as their primary sportsbook if they can get that integration
03:49correct. So, you know, a lot of moving parts still, but not a great look for Penn right now.