BetStop can close your accounts. It can’t yet close what’s on your screen.
· James Forster [CEO, allt.tv]
BetStop, the National Self-Exclusion Register, does exactly what it says. Register once and every licensed wagering provider in Australia has to close your accounts and stop contacting you. It is government-run, operated by Dataworks under contract to the ACMA, and by most measures it works well. Over 50,000 people have registered since it launched in August 2023, and the ACMA’s own statutory review found the system performing strongly on take-up and enforcement.
But BetStop was built to govern the account. It was never built to govern the screen.
The TV remains a source of exposure for self excluded gamblers
What the new laws actually cover
The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Act 2026 passed Parliament on 19 August and received Royal Assent a week later. From 1 January 2027 it introduces some of the most significant advertising restrictions the industry has seen: a ban on wagering ads during live sport and at sports venues, new limits on inducement marketing, and a national Wagering Advertising Opt-out Register.
It is a genuinely broad package. Direct marketing of inducements is now banned for 14 days after signup, for three months after someone deregisters from BetStop, and permanently for anyone flagged as at risk. Commissions tied to customer activity are gone. The ACMA gets stronger blocking powers over illegal operators.
Read closely, the reform still sits on two pillars. One is the account, BetStop, strengthened. The other is online exposure, the opt-out register, a single place for Australians to switch off wagering ads on the online platforms and social media services they use. Both are real and both matter. But the opt-out register is built for feeds and apps, it has no way to reach the primary screen someone is watching the football on. A person can opt out of every wagering ad on their phone and still have the same ads play uninterrupted on the television in front of them, because nothing currently connects that register to the broadcast itself. That link only exists if something like Allt’s technology is sitting in between.
The missing layer is two-way
A self-excluded person can still sit down to watch a broadcast where the second screen in their hand is the primary channel wagering brands compete for. A parent managing what their kids see has no equivalent lever at all, there is no register for household viewing, only individual account settings that a child doesn’t have and an ad ban that only applies during live sport itself.
What’s missing isn’t another list to register on. It’s a live, two-way connection between the person watching and the screen they’re watching on, one that can work the other way to how second-screen technology is normally pitched. Most of what gets built for the second screen is designed to push something to the viewer, a targeted ad, a synced offer, a retail moment. Allt’s underlying infrastructure is two-way by design, so the same real-time sync that can serve a specific ad to a specific viewer can just as easily suppress one, tell the broadcast stream this viewer should not see wagering content, and have that instruction actually reach the screen.
A real-time sync can serve or suppress a specific TV ad to a specific viewer
That is the layer BetStop and the opt-out register cannot currently offer: consent and control sitting with the individual, in the moment, rather than a setting applied uniformly by a platform or a blanket rule applied to a whole ad break.
Where this stands today
Worth being direct about where this stands today. This is real on addressable inventory, streaming and BVOD, where an ad decision can already be made per viewer or per session. It’s not yet possible on linear free to air broadcast, where every household gets the same ad unless the smart TV itself supports addressable insertion, though that technology is moving quickly and won’t stay this limited for long.
Who is actually watching the verified streaming account?
A signal that suppresses gambling advertising on someone’s screen only means something if the platform showing that screen can trust it. Streaming and broadcast subscriptions are routinely held in someone else’s name, a partner, a parent, a flatmate, which means even a platform that wanted to check a viewer’s BetStop status against the account on file could be checking the wrong person entirely. A national, government-run register is one strong way to solve that trust problem at scale, and it’s the conversation we think is most worth having first. It isn’t the only way a broadcaster or a wagering operator could stand this up. The same two-way infrastructure works just as well built directly into a broadcaster’s own app or a wagering operator’s own verified customer base, and several of those conversations are already under way.
BetStop already carries the authority and the register. Allt already carries the two-way, real-time infrastructure sitting inside broadcaster and streaming apps. Put together, a BetStop registration or a verified parental setting could travel with the person into the viewing moment itself, not just their account. That’s the version of this worth building first, but it’s one path among several rather than a gate everything else has to pass through.
Where it goes from there
Once that link exists, whether it starts with BetStop, with a broadcaster, or with a wagering operator’s own verified customers, it stops being only a protection tool and starts being something the industry has a reason to adopt directly, not as an extra cost, but as a practical way to demonstrate compliance with the new inducement and advertising rules taking effect from January. A verifiable, real-time record that a self-excluded or opted-out viewer was never served wagering content is a stronger compliance position than an ad ban applied at the platform level and hoped to hold.
True protection exists when the phone can connect to the broadcast directly.
BetStop solved the account. This is the conversation about solving the screen, and we’re having it on more than one front.