Live Dealer
Live dealer games stream a real croupier from a studio into the casino client, with bets placed digitally on top of the video feed.
What it means
Live dealer games combine a video stream of a human croupier — running real cards, wheels or game-show hardware in a purpose-built studio — with a digital betting layer in the player's client. Optical recognition converts physical outcomes into data, bets settle automatically, and chat connects players to the presenter. Latency is the defining technical constraint: the stream must reach the player fast enough that betting windows, results and video stay in sync.
Why it matters for operators
Live casino is the highest-retention casino vertical for many brands: sessions run longer, average bet sizes are higher, and the human element builds trust that pure RNG games can't. It's also supply-concentrated — a handful of studios produce most of the content, and premium tables carry premium fees, so the make-or-buy decision (shared tables vs dedicated or branded tables) is a real commercial call. Streaming infrastructure choices ripple into player experience: a two-second delay is fine for baccarat, fatal for a fast game show.
Example
An operator upgrades from shared blackjack tables to a dedicated branded table. The table fee jumps, but VIP players get their own environment with the brand's colors and preferred limits — and the segment's monthly hold makes the fee back in the first week.