What are the threats and opportunities that the Internet poses for the gambling and gaming sector in the UK?

With the prospect of an entirely new audience gambling in a more relaxed and unintimidating environment, how much responsibility is there on the part of advertisers?

In gambling and gaming, the Internet - one of the world's least regulated environments - is meeting one of the world's most closely regulated activities. Indeed, few if any forms of legal consumer expenditure are as tightly controlled as gambling, while the Internet gives anyone with a PC access to a world which knows virtually no laws, recognises no governments and provides complete anonymity.

Gambling and gaming are ideally suited to the Internet, involving as they do low bandwidth transactions and no fulfilment or delivery. This allows the Internet to become a new and disruptive distribution channel for the gambling product which impacts all parties in the gambling value chain; consumers, operators, governments and the governing bodies, and media rights holders of the events which are bet on, which are most notably sporting in nature.

This report looks at the current state of the online gambling and gaming market, its impact to date on consumers, and the future outlook for the sector in a world of increased Internet penetration.