00:00ESPN bet, maybe on the flip side, you know, really sort of needs to have a really good footprint on the football season as far as sports betting is concerned.
00:08Trying a lot of different things, as we've seen, Sam, you know, a lot of talking, you know, a lot of advertising, a lot of we're going to do this, we're going to change this, we're going to do that.
00:16I mean, the numbers are going to tell the story. It seems to me from reading this story over at Legal Sports Report that which is, you know, to me a little interesting here, but a little strange, to be honest,
00:25is that ESPN bet is trying to grab the fantasy football users and get them to bet on sports.
00:34But, I mean, you know, we got to be honest with you here, Sam, those are two very different crowds, season-long fantasy football players and people who bet.
00:42Yeah, Penn is definitely rolling the dice here, hoping that they'll be able to convert these customers, keep them, retain them.
00:49This is something they talked about, you know, almost two years ago when Penn and ESPN did this $3 billion deal.
00:56We're going to have a future where everybody on the ESPN fantasy platform is getting custom bets that are tailored to the people they draft.
01:03You know, if you're deciding which quarterback to start, you're going to have prop bets that show up and it's all going to be in the same place.
01:09You know, ESPN fantasy football has the highest user base in fantasy, but Penn has not been able to convert them over to sports bettors that they've been able to keep.
01:17And a big part of that is, they're saying, it's just not having the integrations, right, not having the technology, right, something that they've talked about, to your point, Craig, for a long time and just not had.
01:26So now they're confident here that they're going to have it going into football season.
01:30Users will be able to link their fantasy teams directly to the ESPN bet account.
01:35Penn's hoping that's going to allow players to just move seamlessly between the ecosystems better and encourage them to stay on one app to make it easier to bet as opposed to having to go elsewhere,
01:44like a FanDuel of DraftKings where you're not going to have that experience.
01:47And we'll see what comes out as far as the tailored bets, whether that is actually going to get people to want to bet, make these specific bets more.
01:55But again, this is a $3 billion deal that was signed almost two years ago.
01:59They have not hit their market share goals really at all.
02:02We've heard Penn be more vocal lately about potentially a future.
02:05Without ESPN, there's a proxy fight going on in the background amid all this and a lawsuit tied to it.
02:11So it's really getting to be crunch time for them.
02:14They've been rolling out features more and more in this kind of slow period we have ahead of football season.
02:20So once September hits, once August hits, we'll see if all of this is actually going to be used by people and helping.
02:25If it's not, then it's really going to be an alarm time for Penn to try to figure out sort of what's next here.
02:32They're also going to be banking on ESPN's new direct-to-consumer streaming platform, which we've heard a lot about.
02:37It's going to debut in the fall.
02:38We don't really know what it's all going to entail.
02:41It's been a huge, huge thing for Disney, and they've kind of kept a little bit of under wraps as far as what it's actually going to be.
02:47A lot of people have been wondering how it's going to impact betting.
02:50We don't really have any news there, but they say there's going to be big news eventually closer to the date.
02:55So a lot of big things on the horizon for Penn.
02:58They're hoping to kind of figure it all out and hoping that Q3 goes better than Q2 as they roll out more and more features and hope people stay on the platform.
