Sportsbet is a leader in the Australian wagering market. Through their best-in-class platform, which includes ‘Bet With Mates’, they bring excitement to life for sports and racing enthusiasts - replicating the experience of punting with friends in the pub, no matter where they are.

But after launching 'Bet With Mates', Sportsbet customers were still off the platform (second-screening) to talk about their bets and banter with each other in WhatsApp and other chat apps. Sportsbet wanted to introduce that functionality into ‘Bet With Mates’ and provide everything their customers needed without ever having to leave the platform.

Sportsbet needed a chat feature that met their customers’ high expectations of messaging applications.

Selecting the right chat solution for 'Bet With Mates'

When deciding which solution to use for the 'Bet With Mates' chat, there were a few key criteria.

It had to be feature-rich including reaction and reply functionality and also update in realtime.

As an extremely event-driven business with huge traffic spikes during major events like the Australian Football League, National Rugby League finals, and the Melbourne Cup, the solution needed to be highly performant and scalable.

It had to demonstrate great frontend performance figures, integrate well into Sportsbet’s build pipeline, and be future-proofed for other realtime use cases that developers were planning.

As well as latency needs, Sportsbet also had very stringent security and data handling requirements, so the solution needed to be hosted within Australia on a dedicated cluster.

And finally, the team decided they needed to deliver the new product in less than four months so that it would be live and in customer hands before the next AFL season launch!

Why Sportsbet chose Ably

Based on their requirements, Sportsbet decided to move ahead with Ably after comparing them to other providers. Some key benefits for Sportsbet included:

• Great customer support: Early assessments of Ably’s documentation encouraged Sportsbet to quickly move to build a proof of concept. This involved dedicated support from the Ably team to consult on requirements, providing access to SDKs for their chosen tech stack, and creating a sandbox environment to conduct some integration testing and analysis.
• Easy to get started: Sportsbet started out building a prototype using Ably React Hooks with their existing react client and were impressed with how quickly they could get a basic chat feature going without having to build services. They then added some components that published events including bet placements and group activity as well as features like reactions and comments in the same message stream.
• Support for data security: Ably rapidly spun up a new dedicated cluster within Australia specifically for Sportsbet, which removed another potential barrier to being ready for the AFL season. Ably’s SAML integration also enabled Sportsbet to plug into their existing SSO system in record time.

Sportsbet + Ably: The results

The ‘Bet With Mates’ chat feature has proven a hit with fans, contributing to the organic growth of the overall ‘Bet with Mates’ platform. It has also proven sticky – customers who use ‘Bet With Mates’ Chat use it regularly.

Sportsbet put this success down to Ably’s unwavering reliability when it comes to performance and message delivery. They also reported that autoscaling has performed flawlessly without any incidents of concern in over a year, even on high traffic days. Peak figures for these high traffic periods have reached around 4.5 million published messages a day.

Reflecting on the success of the project and relationship with Ably, Andy commented:

“By choosing to partner with Ably, we were able to deliver a high quality outcome in a frankly impressive timeframe, and free up our delivery teams earlier to focus on other initiatives. It’s a testament to the strength of Ably’s offering how much of our time with them is spent discussing other potential use cases rather than the current implementation.”

Ably: The definitive realtime experience platform. Built for scale.

Sportsbet is one of the thousands of companies that depend on Ably to power realtime experiences for billions of people - including live updates, chat, collaboration, notifications and fan engagement. Reliably, securely and at serious scale.

Why choose Ably?

• 99.999% uptime SLA: We guarantee 5x9s of uptime, but consistently do better. We've had 100% uptime for 5+ years.
• No scale ceiling: Ably handles massive amounts of data throughput and concurrent connections without SREs breaking into sweat.
• Strong data integrity: Guaranteed data ordering, delivery, and exactly-once semantics. Even under unreliable network conditions.
• Almost-infinite elasticity: Bursty connection traffic? Ably seamlessly and automatically absorbs millions of concurrent connections arriving at once.
• Composable realtime: Our range of application building blocks and integrations enable developers to create the live experiences users and businesses demand. From live chat to data broadcast, and collaborative UXs to notifications, our SDKs unlock innovation - with no infrastructure to build.
• Customer-first pricing, affordable at scale: Ably's pricing offers per-minute billing, consumption-based pricing, and volume-based discounts to keep you ROI positive, as you scale.

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