Opinion: media gambling deals - could Jim Ryan be right?
A host of deals last week between online gambling businesses and media companies including film and TV giant MGM, search titan Yahoo! and UK magazine publisher Dennis could just be the tip of the iceberg that PartyGaming chief executive Jim Ryan has warned us about.
LAST WEEK saw a slew of deals between online gambling businesses and media companies.
Fremantle kicked off the activity by signing a deal with MGM “ that’s film and TV giant Metro Goldwyn Mayer of roaring lion fame, before you ask, not Las Vegas’ MGM Mirage “ to turn a range of MGM film titles into online gambling products.
MGM owns the rights to movies including Robocop and Clint Eastwood westerns including A Fistful of Dollars and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. The pic we got sent? The kids from Fame.
Anyway, the tie was soon followed by one involving GTech G2, which renewed its deal with Yahoo! the internet search and entertainment behemoth.
And on Friday, the UK publisher behind titles such as Men’s Health, The Week and Viz, Dennis Publishing, signed up with Mfuse to launch mobile gambling.
Quite what the significance of these deals is at this stage is hard to say.
For Dennis, the smallest of the three companies by a long chalk, the new casino offering relates only to its Monkey Magazine lad mag, and is only for the relatively peripheral WAP market.
But for MGM, if egaming experiments with classic, but old movie titles like Robocop, Fame and the westerns prove lucrative, they could pave the way for a bigger, bolder push on newer film and TV offerings that could make far bigger waves.
And an online gambling deal with Yahoo? Well Yahoo is Yahoo “ a small slice of a big pie is still a lot of pie.
PartyGaming boss Jim Ryan’s fears about the media could just be realised sooner than he fears.