SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Sportardar has made its third commercial takeover of 2021 by acquiring InteractSport, which will allow the supplier to strengthen its data and content offering across Oceania and Asia.
InteractSport is an official partner of Cricket Australia, and also provides services to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – which will allow Sportradar to grow its presence across these markets, as well as in the Indian subcontinent, where cricket dominates the sporting landscape.
The sports data collection and distribution firm had previously boosted its marketing capabilities by acquiring Fresh Eight in March, followed by an enhancement of its position in the US market via its take over of video analytics firm Synergy Sports.
“This acquisition provides Sportradar with the opportunity to widen its data and content offering,” said Carsten Koerl, CEO of Sportradar Group.
“With cricket being one of the most popular sports in the world, we see this as a growth opportunity for the company, especially given the significance of the sport in the Asian region.
“I have tremendous admiration for what Sam Taylor and his team have accomplished to date. I look forward to working with him and InteractSport in continuing to drive value for our sports partners and deliver great products and services to our customers around the world.”
In a statement to its shareholders, Sportradar confirmed that its commercialisation and distribution framework will be combined with InteractSport’s products and solutions, including its content creation capabilities and subject matter expertise, although additional terms have not been released.
This in turn will be utilised to ‘unlock significant growth within regional and global markets’, bolstered by the fact that cricket has over one billion fans and three million participants internationally.
“InteractSport has always been driven by innovation and delivering cutting edge solutions that benefit sports organisations and their fans,” remarked InteractSport CEO Sam Taylor.
“Aligning with Sportradar is a natural step in achieving our company vision – it enables us to scale our operation to develop exciting new products, reach new markets and deliver even greater benefits to our current and future customers.
“We are excited by the opportunity to combine InteractSport’s digital and data capture solutions with Sportradar’s market-leading capabilities in commercialisation and distribution, and the value this can bring to our platform partners, their digital and high performance teams, and the billions of fans the sports we work with have around the world. Our team is thrilled to be joining the Sportradar family and we can’t wait to get cracking.”
InteractSport’s range of services include sports management platforms, competition management capabilities, electronic scoring, registration management and fan-friendly web and mobile applications.
Additional features include a data collection tool to ‘revolutionise’ how cricket is communicated to fans, along with an automated live streaming and in-game management solution.
