Sportradar vice president of product audiovisual Erich Zach discusses analysis that underscores the essential value of streaming to tennis markets

Tennis ranks as one of the world’s most popular betting sports, and anyone who has been watching this month’s US Open will instantly see why. 

It is a fast, point-by-point sport with many different outcomes. This brings a huge choice of different betting opportunities. Tennis is endlessly interactive. 

Betting activity around it is maturing too. From the traditional game-, set- or match-result betting, current trends are increasingly moving towards in-play wagers, with new micro-markets and player-related betting also growing fast.

Innovation has been essential in building engagement for tennis punters, few more so than streaming. 

To support operators’ understanding of how streaming impacts their key commercial metrics, we conducted a deep dive into the tennis experience, and the results are persuasive.

Our analysis of more than 220,000 ATP streaming sessions across a selection of Sportradar’s more than 200 AV clients across 2024 and 2025 found:

•           Year-over-year betting turnover from streamed events trebled in multiple months 

•           Dramatic increases in:

– average stake;

– customer retention; and

– profit per user

Insights from our analysis suggest that live streaming is shifting from being a ‘nice to have’ towards becoming an essential feature for growth-focused operators. 

Simply put: customers who regularly watch live streams within a sportsbook return more frequently and spend longer engaging with sportsbook content. Streaming keeps customers within an operator’s ecosystem for longer, which creates more opportunities both for repeat betting and for long-term retention. 

The study showed the most fundamental impact through betting-turnover statistics. While July and August 2025 saw big turnover gains in non-streamed events (80 per cent and 32 per cent respectively), these were completely outstripped by the returns in streamed matches.

Across July, August and September, there were triple-digit-percentage increases from streamed events – effectively trebling the take in each month. Even in October, already a strong month for ATP-event turnover in both years, there was a near doubling year over year.

What is perhaps most interesting is that those enormous gains across September, October and November from streamed events were coupled with mild decreases in turnover from non-streamed matches. It is maybe too early to draw firm conclusions, but might that suggest that punters are drawing away from non-streamed events towards those where they can actually watch the action?

If that is the case, then adopting streaming becomes not only a growth driver but also a revenue-protection mechanism.

But it is not only in the raw turnover that operator returns improve with streaming.

The data show that streaming content becomes the bettor’s natural home. It is extremely rare for any punter not to place at least one bet while watching a stream. We defined streaming users as those who had watched at least one stream for at least 60 seconds. And 99 per cent of them placed a bet while watching streams, with the average tickets per user rising 5½ times. 

This is also impacted by the positive effect streaming has on customer retention. Across the period analysed, attrition among non-streaming users was above 50%, while for streaming users it remained below 25%.

Even so, it is not just about the amount of bets streaming users place or the time they spend as customers, but also the value to operators of the increased betting volumes generated. We found the average profit per user increased and stakes were higher when comparing streaming users with non-streamers, who are defined as users who had not watched any streams.

So streaming drives engagement, and that engagement is sticky. We looked at the in-play wagering activity of bettors across multiple sports for three months. We found that, for ATP Challenger Tour bettors, both the median number of in-play bets placed and the median stake size were dramatically higher – 146% and 235% respectively. 

This makes sense. The ATP Challenger Tour events often feature players who are less familiar to bettors and take place across a global calendar of tournaments. Live streaming helps provide context and confidence by allowing bettors to see the action unfold in real time rather than relying solely on scores, statistics or visual trackers.

Streaming brings transparency to the experience. You can watch the match, follow momentum shifts and form your own view based on the action taking place on court.

And streaming opens the door to other enhancements of the fan experience. By applying computer-vision analysis to the stream, Sportradar’s 4Sight Streaming technology combines deeper data captured through AI and official data to serve contextual insights into player performance, match momentum and game state through on-screen overlays. 

For events like the ATP Challenger Tour, where the players and their playing styles are less well known, that can have enormous value for punters, because it provides an in-vision information hub for data that would otherwise potentially be hard to find.

In developing 4Sight Streaming further, we also try to get hands-on client feedback to show what actually drives engagement and what motivates people to place a bet in the end. And we have had great feedback from the market about its impact on customer engagement and retention. In particular, it has proved especially popular with operators’ VIP customers, who have shown strong interest in the richer data and visualisation experience 4Sight Streaming brings.

Ultimately, sports betting is driven by engagement, and engagement is driven by narrative. The more invested a customer becomes in a match, an individual player, their comeback story or their rivalries, the more reasons they will have to continue watching and interacting with the event. 

With the ball-tracking technology and real-time data 4Sight Streaming brings to the table, the bettor can get that feel for player performance, momentum shifts, serving efficacy and court positioning. It combines to provide a richer, more interactive experience, which is why we really think 4Sight is the future of streaming.

And that is good news for Sportradar clients. In the past 12 months, Sportradar has successfully rolled out 29,000 new streaming events across 14 sports – and among them, approximately 3,000 ATP Challenger Tour matches. The rollout also included streaming rights to Wimbledon, Roland Garros and US Open Grand Slam tournaments, complementing our existing ATP portfolio.

It all adds up to Sportradar clients having access to an incomparable portfolio of tennis coverage all around the globe, across all time zones. But more than that, it means benefiting from best-in-class streaming products that provably increase betting turnover for operators.

It is our view – based on the analysis we conducted – that in the long run operators should not view streaming as a cost, but as a growth driver. The evidence increasingly suggests that streaming fuels engagement, retention and betting activity. An investment in streaming is an investment in growth.

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