Freddie Longe: Sportsbooks must make content pay in an era of cost discipline

Sportsbooks have spent years enhancing their offering with more content and data. Yet Freddie Longe of Sport AitchQ believes that, in an era of cost controls, it is critical for sportsbooks to understand exactly what that content is worth. Abundance is a state of privilege, and one that has governed the engineering and design of all technology platforms including sports betting this century. The ethos is to easily offer the customer what they want, when they want it as choice is effectively what matters. For sports betting operators, that has meant more fixtures, more feeds and more live streams. Yet whether each element earns its keep is a question that has proved harder to answer, with many neglecting to count costs. Step forward Freddie Longe, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Sport AitchQ, who believes that a reckoning is coming. Longe has spent nearly two decades on the supply side, including building and leading IMG’s betting and gaming business, which became IMG ARENA and was acquired by Sportradar in 2025. Founded in 2025, Sport AitchQ wants to answer some of the industry’s more difficult questions and bring a clear understanding of what content actually delivers for sportsbooks, and whether values are extracted or merely consumed as just another operating expense. The conflict is apparent every Saturday afternoon. Does a boundless stream of content make a bookmaker more effective, or any richer? Does another fixture generate fresh betting activity, or simply divert attention from the offering… “Do I need 101 football matches on a Saturday afternoon when 90 will suffice?” asks Freddie Longe of Sport AitchQ. “Am I just moving money around and adding cost with matches that aren’t driving any incremental turnover?” Live streaming exposes the conundrum perhaps more explicitly. A sportsbook may buy live coverage to attract customers, retain them and promote markets. Many simply plug streaming content in to match a competitor’s offering. Those purchases should be treated as investments, but Longe sees a gap between purchasing ambition and the ability to measure returns. “Do I buy live streaming from a product hygiene perspective because everybody else buys it? Do I buy it because it’s genuinely a customer acquisition and retention tool? Do I buy it because it drives turnover, or is it a combination of these different things?” Before deciding how much more content to acquire, sportsbooks need a clearer account of what their existing portfolios deliver. Sport AitchQ brands this practice as uncovering “content margin”, with the aim of bringing volume, yield, engagement, cost and quality together to assess the value of content investment, not simply to reduce spending. “Bring all of those parts together and you get an output that tells you what you should and shouldn’t be buying. That’s content margin,” Longe explains. Fixing an inherent vice Sport AitchQ believes it is diagnosing a hereditary issue, and one that details the birth and rapid expansion of the sportsbook in the digital era. Online sports betting has expanded relentlessly throughout all territories, taking on all sports and product categories. The expansion phase saw suppliers multiply to feed incumbents of a multi-billion industry. This led to an M&A phase both at a consumer and supplier level, in which tech stacks have never been synergised. Year-on-year, the cost of operating a sportsbook has compounded, a reality told by the accounts of PLCs. Longe leads Sport AitchQ to make sense of the underlying costs of operating and surviving in this environment, or better-yet spider’s web. Especially as incumbents bunker-in for the era of cost controls. “Prices continue to escalate on the content side, a lot of it driven by the competition at the agency layer,” Longe explains. “It’s been a consolidating, acquisitive market for the last 10 years. You have fragmented tech stacks, new markets and a lot of different dynamics, all making it a very difficult space to operate in.” Yet this is no unique symptom for sports betting alone. Longe draws a comparison with pay-TV. Sports broadcasters went through a period of buying extensive rights portfolios before acquiring a better understanding of what persuaded households to subscribe. “As their commercial intelligence improved, they realised a lot of mid- and long-tail football wasn’t driving subscriptions. Values came under pressure and, in some cases, content wasn’t carried any more.” Sportsbooks, he believes, have reached a similar reckoning: “Sports betting is now in that phase.” The task is more complicated, however. A broadcaster might assess thousands of live events. A sportsbook can carry millions, drawing on suppliers of data, video and odds. “The hard part is bringing it all together and turning it into commercial intelligence. That’s what we do,” Longe explains. For Longe, the challenge is not simply the volume of content, but the absence of a single, reliable view of what operators buy and how it performs. A common view Sport AitchQ’s response is ContentQ, a platform engineered to give operators a consolidated view of the content in action and how it performs and where their portfolios could be enhanced or improved. “We provide an independent, agnostic layer that helps sportsbooks make sense of everything they bring into their platform,” Longe explains. The platform has five principal product lines. My Portfolio examines what an operator offers in each market, benchmarks that coverage against competitors and assesses concurrency, including whether additional events at the same time deliver incremental value. My Portfolio’s feed library records the content received and its sources over time. StreamQ, which is live today, monitors streaming quality across suppliers, with DataQ and OddsQ to follow for data and odds. My Suppliers, a managed service, takes on supplier reconciliation and follow-up on the operator’s behalf. The distinction matters. A sportsbook may know how many events it buys without understanding how effectively they fit together. Extensive coverage at peak times can coexist with gaps elsewhere in the schedule. Matching a competitor’s event count may conceal differences in the sports, territories and hours being served. My Portfolio is intended to make those purchasing choices more deliberate. Longe describes its purpose as “knowing what they offer market by market, benchmarking themselves against competitors, understanding concurrency and making their content more efficient”. Streaming presents another information problem. According to Longe, operators can lack a consolidated picture of what customers watch and for how long. Changes in the ownership of rights can further disrupt that understanding. “When rights change hands, the historical engagement data for those properties just vanishes,” he says. ContentQ’s proposition is to bring that fragmented information together without adding another lengthy project to the operator’s development queue. Longe says the service requires no operator integration — a substantial consideration in businesses where even an attractive product can wait years for implementation. “Number one: integrations are an absolute bloody nightmare,” he says. “Even if they love the product, they may not be able to take it for two or three years.” Early customers have also influenced how the information is accessed. An MCP integration through Slack allows users to query the platform directly, reducing the need to navigate another separate tool. “The answers come to them rather than having to go to us,” Longe explains. Source of truth… The more consequential promise concerns supplier accountability. Before asking whether content justifies its price, an operator should be able to establish whether it receives what it bought. Longe describes the objective as “creating a source of truth” that helps operators determine whether suppliers deliver the expected volume and quality. For data feeds, the essential requirements are speed, accuracy, reliability and completeness. Streaming checks cover audio, video, latency and graphics. These are commercially significant distinctions. An event may appear in the portfolio yet fall short of the standard needed to make it useful to the sportsbook or its customers. Counting its delivery alone would miss the problem. “If content doesn’t meet the thresholds a sportsbook and its customers need, we give them the evidence to have that commercial conversation with their suppliers,” Longe noted. Contracts may already contain service standards. The difficulty lies in measuring them consistently across numerous feeds and technology systems. In Longe’s assessment, that has allowed performance obligations to receive insufficient scrutiny. “Service levels in those contracts are often broadly ignored because there’s no way of measuring them,” he argues. Renewals consequently follow a familiar narrative: “Typically, every three years is a big conversation around renewals,” he says. “Increases are discussed. A little bit of frustration, and then eventually deals are signed.” Continuous monitoring could give those discussions a firmer foundation. An operator could arrive with evidence of delivery throughout the contract, a clearer understanding of customer engagement and specific reasons to retain, reduce or expand coverage. Longe argues that scrutiny should continue between negotiations, creating “a level of accountability throughout that cycle”. By the next renewal, the buyer should possess substantially more information about what it needs. It creates a deeper relationship between the operator and the supplier. An operator’s bargaining power will still depend on what alternatives are available, and engagement numbers cannot on their own explain why a customer bet. But they can support a more precise conversation on what an operator needs and what the prices should be for premium content. Importantly, Longe stresses that this is not just about spending less. Suppliers delivering better quality content could prove their worth, while gaps in an operator’s portfolio could create new demand. Longe points to the value of examining where those gaps exist, both within a sportsbook’s own schedule and against its competitors. The next question, he says, is: “What can I source, and from whom, to fill those gaps?” That could lead to more selective spending. An operator might reduce overlap football coverage but buy events for quieter periods; reassess a global streaming bundle against preferences of customers in individual territories. Longe gives examples: more basketball for Greece, or more ice hockey for the Czech Republic. Buying a package doesn’t mean every property in it should be given equal prominence in every market. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer,” Longe says. Longe is careful not to promise a single figure for every operator. Any return will depend on what operators discover about their portfolios and what they choose to do with that information. The wider reflection is that a more informed buyer can also become a better customer too. “Historically, it feels like the relationship has been skewed towards the supplier, and I think most people would agree with that,” says Longe. “We’re trying to create a slightly more equitable dynamic that drives value for everyone,” he says. “Introducing observability and accountability for the first time” may also shine a light on things that some would rather not see. Yet Longe argues that greater transparency can improve content quality and create value across the market. What follows that scrutiny? More relevant content, more intelligently acquired. Longe sees an opportunity to drive “adoption of more content that’s curated towards territories where it’s more and more relevant”. “Why would I take it when the data clearly shows I shouldn’t? But I do want more of this, because the commercial intelligence supports the case,” Longe says. Better measurement, in his view, is not an argument for buying less of everything, but for buying what genuinely earns its place. For an industry long accustomed to measuring trading margin, the next competitive advantage may lie in understanding content margin. The question is no longer simply how much content a sportsbook can offer, but how much value it can get from what it buys.