SportsGrid CEO Jeremy Stein On iGaming Aspirations: From ‘Brian Christopher Show’ To Standalone Casino Channel With 18 Hours Of Programming

Legal, regulated online casinos arrived in 2013 in the U.S. in Delaware and New Jersey, five years before the Supreme Court would overturn the federal ban that swept legal sports betting into 38 jurisdictions. 

But the rapid, COVID-fueled budget deficits that greased the skids for sports betting — well, it has not created room for more states to approve iGaming. If anything, a predictable sports betting backlash has made the uphill battle steeper, as so far only Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia have joined New Jersey and Delaware in legalizing iGaming.

Despite the legislative stalemate, appetite and demand for iGaming and online casino content is growing. Kick, YouTube, and other streaming platforms are brimming with “influencers,” or online personalities entertaining viewers through casino games. And of course there’s the iGaming-associated revenue, where the margins are bigger and ceiling is much higher than in sports betting.

All of which helps explain why SportsGrid, a multimedia content and technology company specializing in sports betting programming, is pushing its chips into the iGaming/online casino sector. This month, the company announced a partnership with popular slots influencer Brian Christopher, the centerpiece of which will be the exclusive Brian Christopher Show. The recorded show will have its own dedicated segment on SportsGrid’s new Casino & Gambling Network, set to launch next year.

“As part of the agreement, Brian Christopher will lead unique and engaging on-camera and audio programs, including off-site projects and promotional content,” SportsGrid and Christopher announced. 

In the below conversation, SportsGrid CEO Jeremy Stein discusses plans for the network in 2025 and beyond and touches on distribution, social casinos, the tension between regulated and unregulated businesses, and more. 

Casino Reports (CR): As SportsGrid intends to pivot toward becoming a gambling channel, not only sports betting, what can you tell us about how this may look come 2025?

Jeremy Stein (JS): Initially, we’re going to be nesting casino content on our network. There’s the partnership with Brian Christopher, we have a few other streamers, and there’s going to be a lot of big announcements involving talent that’s outside the industry.

We work with sports betting operators and we have a large betting audience, but if you look at the industry, the sports betting operators also operate online casinos. Expanding is a way for us to continue to “super serve” our customers at the operator level, but also our audience. Both of them demand this type of content.

On the distribution side, we plan to nest [the new programming] on our network, and once we find the right time slots, the right audiences, we’ll go out into the market and plan to actually create a standalone casino channel.  

SportsGrid has a great sports audience, it’s always gonna have a great sports audience, and we’re not going to fundamentally change that. So a standalone casino channel will live elsewhere and give us further footholds. In sports, we have a 26 percent market share, and we’re excited to explore new categories.

CR: You anticipated another question I had — whether the programming would be built-in or become a separate entity …

JS: It’s a natural progression, right? For SportsGrid now, we produce 18 hours of live original video content. And we have a very large audience when live sports are actually happening, right? So we’re certainly not going to mix in a casino show on a football Sunday afternoon. The calendar is going to kind of dictate the fact that we do need to actually stand this up as its own channel. The goal is to eventually have around 18 hours of dedicated iGaming, casino-oriented content.

The interesting thing about sports versus casino is that sports are live, right? And there’s something that’s happening every single day. It’ll take it a while to scale up to that level with casino content. But there is probably going to be some production magic that can happen. We don’t necessarily need to be filming 18 hours of live original casino content on a daily basis.

CR: Brian Christopher has been everywhere of late, picking up all sorts of sponsorships, as much as Kevin Hart in regular advertisements it seems like. I’m not saying he’s overexposed, but I suppose that’s always a risk. It does sound like you guys are going to be doing something a bit different with the Brian Christopher Show. Anything you can share about plans for the show?

JS: There’s a few original concepts that we’re working on and they’re actually going to go into production next calendar year. It will be different from everything that you’re seeing on YouTube. We’re a fundamentally different format. So that’s going to lend itself to the actual type of content that we’re producing and it’s something that’s exciting to both of us. We’re exposing Brian to a new audience, and we’re creating great new content in the process.

As part of the partnership, we are going to actually nest some of his current programming on our network. That’s kind of an easy way to expose our audience to Brian, and actually let them know what is to come. We like to promote everything that’s coming well in advance.

CR: Is there a particular month or quarter in 2025 you guys are targeting for launch? 

JS: We’re looking to go into production in the first quarter. It may be a little while after that when we have something that we’re going to go to market with.

There’s a lot that’s going to happen in post-production on this side because again, it’s different types of content that we’re producing relative to what we’re doing. Obviously when you’re live, it goes out the door immediately. So this is new to both of us.

CR: How much of concern is it, broadcasting casino content to audiences where iGaming may not be expressly legal, or where there may be underage persons attempting to access?

JS: It’s very important at SportsGrid that we clear what’s known as standards and practices. There’s a lot that goes into that in each distribution platform that we use. But importantly — that we have cleared the content for sports betting, right? While our content is geared towards the sports betting audience, it’s broadcast in jurisdictions that do not have legal sports betting. 

So this is something that we are very conscious about, and we try to do everything in a very responsible manner and we work directly with all of our distribution platforms to ensure that our content is cleared, to ensure that we’re putting things in the appropriate time slots. We make an effort to slot programs in times where it is going to be viewed by the appropriate audience.

CR: Content creation has probably never been easier, but it seems never more complicated and fragmented, too. Where are the majority of SportsGrid’s audiences finding and consuming the programming?

JS: We’re distributed on over 30 different FAST platforms (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV). That includes connected TV platforms like Roku, Samsung TV+, LG, Vizio. Those are very big platforms for SportsGrid.

And unsurprisingly, it mirrors what you would actually see in the CTV (connected TV) market. Interestingly, though, we cut up our network into two-to-five minute clips and we syndicate that all across the internet. Our ethos is, we want to be free and clear and we want consumers to consume our content in any way that they see fit. Last calendar year, just in that segment alone, we did a billion off-platform views.

In fact, there’s a good chance that if you landed on a sports website in the United States, you’ve seen our content and maybe you’ve not realized that you’ve seen our content because it could be branded by one of our partners. That’s something we take great pride in — we are pretty ubiquitous, and we’re still growing. Up 90 percent year-over-year, and that margin is actually widening into football season.

CR: As SportsGrid prepares to branch into iGaming: What’s your perspective on social casinos? Kind of a gray area, and suddenly somewhat controversial. Some of them do feature live dealer games, and that may be relevant to some of the same audiences that SportsGrid may be looking to capture.

JS: I’m going to answer in reverse order, first on live dealers. Live dealers are incredibly interesting to us. A live dealer in our view should be entertainment and this is something we’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s like, hey, what if we actually, you know, create something very similar to a live dealer, but instead of the traditional live dealer, it’s talent?

So I think that there are a lot of innovative things that you’re actually going to see in that market — live dealers as content. Regarding sweepstakes casinos, or social casinos, they’re incredibly interesting.

And they are compliant under sweepstakes law. They certainly have their challenges and headwinds at the state level. Maybe it plays out similarly as daily fantasy sports.  At the same time, they’re very big businesses, and big businesses, they don’t just go away in the face of any regulatory headwinds, they morph, they find ways to survive, maybe they buy regulated businesses. So I think it’s something that’s here to stay. I think that they are, in many respects, highly innovative.

Regulated businesses are always going to face pressure from unregulated businesses, and that’s just how it works, right? This is what we saw with PrizePicks and Underdog. Now you’re seeing it again in social casinos and you’re gonna see it again in the future with something else.

CR: Anything we didn’t cover today you’d like to add? 

JS: I always want to highlight our growth. We’re very excited with what we’re seeing in terms of football season. If you look at it on a year-over-year basis to where we are, it’s already up several hundred percent. Our growth has been astounding and honestly, it always exceeds our own internal expectations, every single year. So we’re excited to see what happens throughout the rest of the season.