World Series of Poker makes Internet debut

Fri, Apr 18, 2003 (11:25 a.m.)

The 34th annual World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe is expected to draw as many as 8,000 players from around the globe as well as hundreds of tourists who will watch an event that has become the gambling industry's top spectator sport.

For the first time this year, hundreds more are expected to watch the event live from their homes thanks to Internet technology that is less than a year old.

Anyone over 18 with a credit card can purchase for $14.95 live webcasts of the 33 poker finals games that started this week and will take place over the next month. For $29.95, viewers can buy an Internet feed of the final, five-day championship game of hold 'em poker that begins May 19 and ends May 23 with the winner of an estimated $2 million pot.

"Poker is played by millions of people worldwide," Nick Behnen, a marketing executive at Binion's and husband of the casino owner Becky Behnen, said in a statement Monday. "We wanted to bring the World Championship closer to them by offering the live broadcast on the Internet."

Besides making poker history, the webcast will also open the door to a host of other potential Internet broadcasts in this event-rich city.

"This is the first event to use the technology on this scale," said Mio Babic, president of iStreamPlanet Co. of Las Vegas. "We will be broadcasting over 34 days from six to 12 hours per day."

Technology companies such as Microsoft have been testing live Internet broadcasting systems for years. Early versions of the technology -- primarily used to distribute music and videos online -- transmitted feeds that were sometimes choppy and slow to download.

In the past year, a handful of companies have been licensed by Microsoft to distribute material online using software from the tech giant and the latest broadband Internet technology. "Broadband" technology compresses data signals to distribute information over cable or telephone lines more quickly and at a higher quality standard than typical dial-up modems.

Three-year-old iStreamPlanet is one of those companies. The Las Vegas enterprise got its start broadcasting live weddings for the Little White Wedding Chapel on the Las Vegas Strip and has since branched out into the convention business by broadcasting keynote addresses, speeches and workshops for such giants as the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, the Comdex trade show and the National Association of Broadcasters.

"A lot of people decide not to show up (to conventions) but there may be hundreds of thousands out there who still want to see what the new technologies are," Babic said.

Until about a year ago, the technology to link such feeds to secure payment mechanisms wasn't up to par, while many operators weren't charging for their services anyway, he said.

That has changed over the years, driven largely by efforts in the music and movie industries to seek ways to sell content online and fend off Internet piracy.

Casinos present another untapped market for the technology because they often stage premium events that aren't otherwise available on television, he said.

iStreamPlanet is already negotiating with major Strip casinos to offer other pay-per-view events online, from music concerts to boxing events. Babic declined to name the companies, saying deals haven't been signed yet.

Other companies that have recently been licensed by Microsoft to distribute live Internet broadcasts include CinemaNow Inc., a Marina del Rey, Calif.-based company that distributes movies on demand, and San Diego-based Empire DRM, which has distributed educational videos and business seminars to medical and biotech companies.

Binion's approached the company last year with a plan to broadcast the 2002 poker championship. While the technology to secure payments for the feed wasn't yet in place, iStreamPlanet instead rebroadcast segments of the contest.

More than 56,000 viewers from more than 30 countries logged on to view the games last year, an impressive turnout given that the broadcasts weren't marketed to the public, Babic said.

With the television debut last week of "Lucky," a show on the FX cable channel centered on a recovering gambler who lost his money playing in the World Series of Poker, interest in this year's tournament should be even greater, he said.

About 250 people have so far paid fees to watch the event live.

The transition from weddings to conventions to poker games isn't as unusual as it sounds, said Babic, a native of Croatia who played professional basketball in China before coming to the United States to study computer technology.

"I could spend all day watching basketball," he said. "People who are into (poker) will watch this for hours."

All of the broadcasts allow people with a specific interest to enjoy an event that may be hundreds of miles away, he said.

One wedding chapel broadcast for an Irish couple was fed to more than 250 computer locations worldwide, he said.

"We got letters from around the world, thanking us for being able to see the wedding."

The broadcast is an innovative way to market a casino that has already acquired an international following, said Sue Schneider, chief executive of Internet gambling consultants The River City Group and chair of the Interactive Gaming Council, a Canadian-based trade association.

"I haven't seen anything else like this in the gaming world," Schneider said. "Then again, this is sort of a unique event. I don't know if it could be duplicated elsewhere."

Binion's could collect names from the broadcast to use in their traditional marketing campaigns as well as use them to help introduce a real-money Internet casino someday, she said.

Last year the company launched a "play for fun" area of its website intended to serve as a first step to introducing a Web casino for non-U.S. bettors.

Company representatives couldn't be reached by press time to determine the status of the online casino.

Last week the company pulled a contest from its website that would have offered webcast purchasers a chance to win a seat at the $10,000 buy-in championship game for an extra $20. Regulators said the contest could have run afoul of state law prohibiting lotteries and federal rules that outlaw Internet gambling.

[via iStreamPlanet]