Bloomberg – Roughly 100 percent of lottery tickets are currently sold by retailers—gas stations, supermarkets, or convenience stores—that do little more than print tickets with numbers. It was only a matter of time before someone made apps for that process.
Shoutz, an Austin (Tex.)-based startup, announced an agreement Tuesday with the Mega Millions lottery that will bring the game to its LotteryHUB mobile app, which launched in September with the rival Powerball lottery game. Now the two largest forces in the $78 billion per year U.S. lottery industry will share a mobile platform that covers the vast majority of the country, and Shoutz will hold a significant advantage should states further relax restrictions on digital lottery sales.
The U.S. has lagged in turning lotteries over to digital domains. While in Europe, about a third of lottery sales are conducted via mobile and online platforms, only three states—Illinois, Georgia, and Minnesota—sell lottery tickets online. Only Illinois has its own mobile app to sell tickets. Seven states sell online lottery ticket subscriptions.
“Lotteries are the quiet giant of entertainment,” says Brad Duea, Shoutz’s president and the one-time president of music-sharing service Napster. He puts the number of retailers involved in the trade at about 240,000. “It’s massive and mainstream.”
