How Germany’s leading horse-racing operator rebuilt its live experience on Vindral LiveCloud.
In horse racing, fractions of a second decide everything, both on the track and on screen. With Vindral Live, our customers see the race exactly as it unfolds, in a quality that makes them feel like they’re standing right at the rail.
Riko Luiking, Managing Director of Wettstar / German Tote
At a glance
Customer: Wettstar (German Tote Service- und Beteiligungs GmbH)
Industry: Online and retail horse-racing betting
Headquarters: Neustadt am Rübenberge, Germany
Vindral solution: Ultra Low Latency Streaming via Vindral Live
Partnership since: 2024
About Wettstar
Wettstar is the leading German horse-racing betting brand and the digital flagship of German Tote Service- und Beteiligungs GmbH, jointly owned by France’s PMU and Germany’s Betriebsgesellschaft der Galopp-Rennvereine (BGG). From its headquarters in Neustadt am Rübenberge, Wettstar offers pari-mutuel and fixed-odds betting on gallop and trot racing from Germany, France, the UK, and tracks around the world. Alongside its online platform, the company runs its own retail shops and partners with around 40 stationary outlets across Germany, while also marketing live race broadcasts to industry partners. Since BGG’s takeover of German Tote in 2005, Wettstar has grown into one of the most prominent betting brokers for horse racing in the German market.
Unusually for a betting brand, Wettstar is owned by the racetracks themselves. That ownership shapes how the company thinks about its product, from the markets it offers to how a race is presented on screen.
The challenge: a sport where every frame matters
Horse racing is one of the most time-sensitive products in betting. Races are short, results are decided in fractions of a second, and the gap between the last accepted bet and the photo finish is narrow. For Wettstar, live video that runs in step with the track, in a quality that lets a viewer follow what is happening on screen, is not a feature on top of the product. It is the product.
For Luiking, the test is simple. Customers need to trust what they see, and they need to see it now. If the stream sits noticeably behind the live commentary, or if the picture is not sharp enough to follow the silks down the back straight, the product fails twice: as entertainment, and as a fair betting product.
Before partnering with Vindral, Wettstar’s streaming setup ran on a more traditional HLS-based delivery stack. It worked, but came with the trade-offs every operator in live betting recognises: latency measured in seconds rather than fractions of a second, visible quality drops when bandwidth dipped, and an experience that varied between devices and networks.
Finding Vindral
The brief was specific. Wettstar wanted consistent ultra low latency without giving up picture quality, at a scale that could handle a full Sunday card of international racing.
A side-by-side pilot settled the question. Running Vindral against the incumbent stack on the same races, the team saw the latency gap close almost immediately. The bigger surprise was the picture quality at the moments that decide a bet: the final furlong and the finish.
Implementation and onboarding
Wettstar went live on Vindral LiveCloud in 2024. Vindral’s engineers handled most of the work on the encoding and distribution side as a managed service, while Wettstar’s team focused on product integration.
Vindral’s familiarity with live betting showed from the first configuration call. The platform was already shaped around the demands of fast-moving sports, so onboarding was a matter of fine-tuning rather than building anything from scratch.
The results
Stream-related customer complaints, once a recurring item on the support backlog, have effectively gone away. Viewers stay with the stream longer, from the parade ring through to the result, a change Wettstar attributes to the combination of low latency and reliable picture quality.
Internally, the change shows up in support load. Tickets about the race being ahead of the stream have stopped coming in. Disputes around late bet acceptance are rarer. The operations team spends less time troubleshooting playback across the device and network mix that comes with online betting.
A standout moment
One race stuck with the team. A French Group event, big pool, tight finish: exactly the kind of race where the old stream had been weakest. With Vindral in place, the finish landed clean and on time. The control room reaction, Luiking later recalled, was less about the partnership and more about a sense that this was how a live racing product was supposed to look.
Looking ahead
Wettstar’s plans with Vindral extend past pure infrastructure. Interactive features, second-screen experiences, and multi-angle viewing are on the roadmap, building on a delivery layer the team now treats as a foundation rather than a problem to manage.
Horse racing has a fantastic product. The challenge for our industry has always been how to deliver that product digitally without watering it down. Vindral gives us a foundation we can build on for years.
Riko Luiking, Managing Director of Wettstar & German Tote
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