- SPIELO G2 will provide online casino games to Ontarian residents.
- The website PlayOLG.ca is expected to go live by late 2013 with lottery sales and real-money casino games.
- Bingo, sports betting, and online poker will be introduced at a later date.
Boss Media AB, a division of SPIELO G2, has been selected as the primary service provided for online gaming in Ontario, Canada.
The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) announced on Friday that SPIELO, best known for operating the International Poker Network, will provide online casino games to Ontarian residents.
SPIELO was selected after what OLG called “a competitive procurement process.” According to reports, Canadian Amaya Gaming, new owner of Ongame Poker Network, and London-based OpenBet also submitted applications.
The website PlayOLG.ca is expected to go live by late 2013 with lottery sales and real-money casino games. Bingo, sports betting, and online poker will be introduced at a later date.
The software platform for online poker has not yet been selected, though SPIELO’s Boss Media makes certain sense: It already operates the only regulated online poker network in Canada—the cunningly-named Canadian Poker Network—which currently shares liquidity across two sites—Espacejeux.com and PlayNow.com.
The network launched in December 2010, with Espacejeux.com, operated by government-controlled Loto-Québec, and PlayNow.com, operated by British Columbia Lottery Commission. In January 2013, Manitoba Lotteries also joined the network, piggybacking onto PlayNow.com.
Player liquidity is shared across these three jurisdictions, and it maintains a small but regular player pool of approximately 200 cash game players playing at any one time.
The addition of Ontario onto the network would be significant: almost 40% of Canada’s population is in Ontario, comparable in size to Quebec, British Columbia and Manitoba combined.
According to Friday’s OLG press release, Ontarians spend $400 million annually gaming on what OLG calls “offshore grey market internet gaming providers.”
The Boss Media platform is also the backbone of the International Poker Network (IPN), though this has suffered a dramatic fall in traffic, declining over 80% in two years. Much larger now is its Italian network, Poker Club Italia and the Swedish-only independent Svenska Spel, also runs on Boss Media software.