Penn Entertainment
Live Streaming
Built and launched live streaming across 12+ sports entirely as the sole PM — delivering four weeks ahead of schedule. Against a broader product headwind of flat or declining MAUs, streaming drove peak YoY improvements of 70% in GGR, 22% in bets placed, and 3% in handle on streamed events — evidence that the feature changed betting behavior, not just user counts.
Betting Is Better When You Can Watch
Live betting is the highest-margin segment of a sportsbook. We had the markets. We didn't have the stream. I built live streaming end-to-end as the sole PM — and it demonstrably changed how users bet.
Context
Live betting drives disproportionate GGR relative to pre-game betting. Markets move faster, users make more decisions, and the engagement loop between watching a game and reacting to it with a bet is one of the most powerful behavioral drivers in the product. Competitors knew this. Most major sportsbooks had embedded streaming. We didn't.
The absence was a competitive gap and a revenue gap simultaneously. Users who wanted to watch and bet were leaving the app to find a stream elsewhere — breaking the engagement loop entirely. Every minute a user spent outside the product watching a game was a minute they weren't betting on it.
The strategic case was straightforward: keep users in the app, show them the game, watch live betting volume follow.
The Build
I owned the feature end-to-end as the sole PM — concept, spec, integration, launch, and post-launch iteration.
Streaming was embedded directly on the matchup page, the natural home for a user who had already navigated to a specific event. The integration kept the betting experience immediately accessible alongside the stream — users didn't have to choose between watching and wagering.
The build covered over a dozen sports at launch, with 100K+ streams running across the sports calendar.
Timeline: Development-ready in Q4 2024. Target launch was set, then leadership accelerated the timeline. The team delivered four weeks ahead of the original schedule — a meaningful operational win on a technically complex integration.
Launch: February 2025.
What It Drove
The most important context for these numbers: the broader product was experiencing flat or declining MAUs month-over-month during this period. Live streaming drove growth across every key betting metric against that headwind. It didn't just attract more users — it changed how existing users bet.
Peak YoY improvements on events with an associated stream:
| Metric | Peak YoY Improvement |
|---|---|
| Handle | +3% |
| Bets placed | +22% |
| GGR (net revenue) | +70% |
The GGR improvement outpacing handle and bets placed is the most telling signal. Users weren't just placing more bets — they were placing higher-value bets. The presence of a live stream kept users in the app longer, increased their engagement with live markets, and drove them toward wagers that generated more revenue per bet.
Iteration: BetVision
Post-launch I introduced BetVision from BetGenius for NFL streams — an enhanced experience designed to overlay betting data and visualizations directly onto the stream.
It didn't work. Engagement on the BetVision experience was minimal and user feedback was poor. The experience was overcomplicated — it added visual noise to what should have been a clean watch-and-bet loop. We made the call to remove it.
The lesson wasn't that enhanced stream experiences are wrong in principle. It was that the baseline experience — stream plus accessible markets — was already doing the job, and adding complexity on top of it created friction rather than value. Sometimes the right product decision is knowing when to stop adding.
What I Learned
Keeping users in the app is itself a revenue lever. The engagement loop between watching a game and betting on it is powerful precisely because it's uninterrupted. Every step that takes a user out of the product — to find a stream, to check a score — is a step where they might not come back. Closing that loop was the entire product thesis and the data validated it.
Delivering ahead of schedule on complex integrations requires a PM who manages up as aggressively as they manage the work. The four-week acceleration came from leadership pressure and the team's execution. My job was to hold the scope tight enough that acceleration was possible without compromising the launch experience.
Simple beats enhanced when the core experience is strong. BetVision was a reasonable hypothesis — more data, more context, better decisions. In practice it cluttered an experience users already found valuable. Removing it was the right call and we made it quickly. Knowing when to cut is as important as knowing what to build.