This has been enabled by something called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Players love to see the playing cards being cut and dealt in front of their eyes – it all adds confidence to the online casino experience while creating a social platform. The ability to engage and interact with both dealers and croupiers, at the same time as seeing the little silver ball dance around the roulette wheel, still appeals.

Today, live casinos are more popular than their digital forefathers with their painful RNGs. With the arrival of HTML5, increased bandwidth, and the evolution of the smart phone, it would take a decade for the live casino format to really bed in.

The business set up shop in Riga, Latvia, and worked hard to iron out the many technological bumps created by live streaming. It was a great idea, but the supporting technology just was not there.įast forward to 2006 and the arrival of Evolution Gaming. Spotty connections, breaks in the live stream, and a generally poor service kicked the format into the long grass. The first live casinos streamed out of Asia and were very problematic. However, there were still sceptics who were suspicious of the algorithms behind any online casino software. By now, online casinos were fairly well established regulated and overseen by numerous watchdogs.

From the beginning, online gambling has been a highly lucrative Internet business generating revenue and driving innovation.Īround 2003, the first live streaming casinos appeared. Random number generators would power the probability, and state-of-the-art online security would keep the money safe and the hackers at bay. Every game would be crunched into code, to re-appear – renewed and digitised – on computer and smart phone screens worldwide. The next two decades would see the evolution of the online casino from baccarat and blackjack to craps, roulette, and the slots. In the mid 1990s, the world’s first true online casino appeared thanks to the canny programming work of a small software development company called Microgaming. The Live Casino has arrived, and it looks like it is here to stay. The casino has gone full circle from the high street to the Internet and back again.

Smart live gaming casino