Cheltenham Festival Live Webcasts

Next years Cheltenham Festival Live webcasts will be available to punters online via TRINITY Mirror which is about to launch a webcasting service, in partnership with five bookmakers' firms, which will offer punters the chance to watch and bet on live coverage of 4,000 horse races each year from the comfort of their own homes. Chief executive Sly Bailey will tie up television rights with Racing UK, the existing racecourse-owned subscription channel, which broadcasts from 31 of 59 racecourses around the country. These will include Aintree, home of the Grand National - traditionally the biggest single betting event on the calendar - Cheltenham, with its week-long National Hunt Festival, and Epsom, the home of the Derby. The Racing Post and Racing UK have offered a pilot of the site for the Grand National and in the nine days leading up to the race, it recorded more than 2.4 million page impressions from 157,000 unique users. Bookmakers have reported "exponential growth" in all forms of online gambling in the past couple of years as broadband has become more widely available. This week, Dublin-based Paddy Power reported that it had generated the majority of its profits from internet betting, including poker, rather than from its betting shops, with its non-retail businesses accounting for 63% of its £12.2m operating profits in the first-half of the year. Even William Hill, which earlier this year overtook the Hilton-owned Ladbrokes as owner of the country's biggest chain of bookies' shops, with 2,200 outlets, gets 20% of its business from online betting. Trinity Mirror has yet to announce which bookies will be featured on the site, although William Hill has ruled itself out. "We've just bought 624 shops from Stanley," said David Hood, William Hill's head of PR, referring to May's £504m purchase. "We wouldn't have done that if we thought this wasn't good for our business." In 2004, bookmakers' shops experienced a 72% increase in the volume of betting business - suggesting the sector is in good health. "At present, even with broadband, the quality of streaming can be a bit mixed, and the technology is still some way away for the ordinary punters," Hood said. "Bookmakers' shops and websites are dealing with very different markets, with different punter profiles. The people who bet online are more like traders than punters," he said. "The betting shop will be around for a good while yet."

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