NEW YORK _ "Alexa, bet $50 on the Yankees."
In the not-too-distant future, sports fans will be able to tap their phones, click on their smart TVs or simply blurt out commands for the digital device du jour to carry out, including how much of the family checking account to bet on whether Noah Syndergaard's next pitch is going to be a ball or a strike. Or what Aaron Judge will do in his next at-bat. Or if the Giants will score on their next random early-September, third-quarter drive.
"We're thinking about all of the above," says FanDuel CEO Matt King, who has become a bit of a mad scientist, tasked with figuring out how to secure prime real estate on the sports gambling rocket ship that was cleared for takeoff last month.
For example, any game format you do in an office pool, FanDuel wants to be able to provide, from Super Bowl box pools to March Madness brackets. Working with regulators, King wants to mine into greater capabilities to offer more products to customers now that the shackles of illegal sports gambling have been lifted, allowing companies like his to unlock the potential to do so much more than daily fantasy sports with their existing platforms _ and develop new ones.
"There are many ways people interact with sports," King says. "Some of it was done with pen and paper, some of it was offshore, some of it was with a bookie down the street, and some people haven't really thought about it. We can deliver some really interesting products around that, that can capture the emotional game mechanics some people are interested in."
Think of it as FanDuel and other fantasy companies could only use 1 percent of their brains before the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, and now they can use everything they have to revolutionize sports entertainment in a pro-gambling world.
"The way people consume sports is going to fundamentally change in the next five to 10 years and we want to be at the forefront of that," King says. "We come at it through very much a gaming lens, but gaming will also drive what content people are interested in, what games they want to interact with and a number of other things, so we feel like we can play a very interesting position, particularly if we do it the right way, through partnerships with others, because at the end of the day, we have one of the largest user bases of connected millennial sports fans."
For FanDuel, that means about 7 million users. DraftKings reports its user base at around 10 million. It is not out of the question that once those sites pivot to become sportsbooks, those numbers may triple.
