Mississippi casinos’ new legal sports betting options had another middling month, while broadcaster NBC appears to be staking out its own wagering turf.
Last week, the Mississippi Gaming Commission (MGC) issued its November casino market report, during which statewide gaming revenue hit just over $161m. That’s $1m less than the state reported in the same month last year and more than $6m below October 2018’s total.
The state’s retail sportsbooks contributed $1.67m to November’s revenue total, an improvement over the dismal $1.18m they earned in October, but well below the $5.3m the books reported in September, the state’s second full month of legal wagering.
November’s statewide sports betting handle totaled $44.5m, up significantly from October’s $32.8m and a new record high for the state. But the figure is paltry compared with the nearly $331m that New Jersey’s licensed sportsbooks handled in November, underscoring Mississippi’s lack of online and mobile wagering options, which accounted for nearly three-quarters of New Jersey’s handle last month.
NBC REGISTERS BETTING DOMAINS
Meanwhile, the eagle-eyes over at Domain Name Wire noticed that US broadcaster NBC had registered a number of betting-related domains last Friday, including NBCSportsbook.com, NBCSportsSportsbook.com and non-dot-com versions of NBCSportsBet and NBCSportsBetting.
It’s unclear whether NBC is preparing the ground for the launch of an in-house sports betting division or whether the move was purely defensive in nature. The report noted that third-party firms had already registered the dot-com versions of many of the domains that NBC chose to register for other internet suffixes.
However, NBC’s move did come just days after Toronto-based sports broadcaster TheScore announced a deal to launch online and mobile sports betting operations in New Jersey as a way to retain the interest of the 4m active customers who rely on the company for sports scores and other data.
