Fast picture options for Australia are now extremely limited.
Previously there was a commercial installation available if you had the $ and got the right Sky sales rep, I believe there were also unauthorised redistributed streams. Latency sat at around 2 seconds behind live and cost was mid 4 figures per year if acquired legitimately. Around 2 years ago HD was introduced and the latency on the commercial pictures jumped to 4 seconds which is only around a second faster than the Sky feeds on Foxtel. In theory the commercial installation is still available but not only is it much closer to the latency available to the mass market, but permission to access the platform is very tightly regulated. It is what is known as a 'bouquet' package on the VAST satellite network if you want to look into it further.
Streaming was still relatively low latency until about 6 months ago, about on a par with the Foxtel pictures. There were also various tricks around to get images well in advance of the usual 5 second delay, however it was essentially a still image delivered with about 2 second latency (as the feed was delivered in 3 second chunks). Useful, but only in very limited circumstances. Now that Flash is on the way out, Sky have switched to HLS and latency is off the charts. There are ultra low latency options available to Sky but so far they haven't gone down that road, presumably because they have a virtual monopoly in Australia and lower latency often comes at the expense of lower reliability and quality. The general public public aren't going to care if their pictures are 2 seconds behind live or 20 seconds, it's only a limited subset of punters that would appreciate a low latency option so I can't see them investing heavily in the technology. They see the future as gimmicky apps like Sky Racing Active and so on.
There are raw feeds available but these are proprietary to Tabcorp. Most vision is delivered via IPTV from the track to Tabcorp/SKY but some is delivered by satellite. I've been fortunate enough to have seen the Tabcorp HQ setup and it is mouthwatering to say the least, the latency on the raw IPTV feeds is close to real time and the sat feeds aren't far behind.
Until very recently anyone with a small satellite dish could do a blind scan and pick up a handful of meetings each week with very low latency around 0.7-0.8 seconds. However in recent times these have been encrypted and impossible to view. There is a Sky satellite feed distributed for international markets but the latency isn't as low, 2.6-2.7 seconds and you only get a relatively small selection of races. There are redistributed feeds of this available but they are obnoxiously expensive and add another layer of latency on top again, around 3.2 seconds. It is currently unencrypted but you are likely to need a 3 metre dish in order to view it, and live in the right part of the world with line of site to the satellite. Assuming all of the raw sat feeds are going to continue to be encrypted, this is the lowest latency option currently realistically available.
However at least 1 party is trading off the raw vision. Slow starters are drifting significantly within 1-2 seconds after the start. Sometimes the race caller picks them up early but even if they don't, they are still drifting. Whoever it is isn't a particularly good race reader, I've seen some crazy fluctuations recently, but their time advantage more than makes up for the lack of skill. It could conceivably be Tabcorp themselves, I'm not aware of anything preventing them from lawfully doing this but I suppose it could be someone intercepting the feeds before they hit the mixing desk, although this seems unlikely. Unauthorised distribution from within the control room seems even more far fetched, at any one time there are a lot of bodies in the room and would surely be quickly discovered. I've thought about it in some detail and it seems the most likely scenario is Tabcorp playing on the exchange themselves. They certainly don't seem to be willing to sell the raw feeds, I'd like to consider myself reasonably well connected and I've never heard of even a single instance of anyone acquiring these feeds, even the really big fish.
Long story cut short, fast pictures are like unicorns in Australia. However we are blessed with having the only greyhound track on the exchange where it is possible to place a bet after the jump
