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SKYBET REVIEW
SkyBet is a division of BSkyB Ltd, the company that produces many highly successful satellite television channels such as the Sky Sports family of channels. SkyBet emerged when Surrey Sports, an established UK bookmaker who were acquired by BSkyB Ltd in 2000, were rebranded into SkyBet in July 2002. Sky TV have helped to turn SkyBet into something that the previous owners of Surrey Sports could never have achieved, in our opinion. Backed by the BSkyB empire, SkyBet are poineering the way forward in terms of interactive betting; not only do they have a very successful online bookmaker service via their website, Sky.com, you can also bet through Sky TV by "pressing the red button" from the comfort of your sofa and you can also bet using your mobile thanks to their fast new sports WAP betting service. We feel that SkyBet has the bookmaking experience, financial backing and technology to make us consider them trustworthy, secure and robust; certainly a bright prospect for the future.
Open a Sky Bet account today via TakesAllSports and place a £10 bet and they will match it with a free £10 bet! To claim your free £10, open an account which takes less than 5 minutes, place a £10 bet on any sport and the free £10 will be credited to your account straight away.
Banking options are currently limited with SkyBet, but thankfully they cover all the major methods; we were told by their customer service representatives that they are in the process of creating news ways to deposit and withdraw, such as Neteller and Click & Buy. For now, though, your options are Mastercard and Visa credit cards, Visa Electron, Solo, Maestro, Visa Delta and Laser debit cards.
There are 3 channels of support at SkyBet; you can use their excellent Live Chat facility to speak to a SkyBet chat representative straight away, or call them on their freephone number if you live wiothin the UK, you can also email them at help@skybet.com. It took less than a minute to speak to someone using either their Live Chat facility or the freephone number, we recieved replies to our many emails, all within 24 hours of us sending them, some were considerably quicker, so it could be as little as a couple of hours before you get a reply. All methods were useful, any questions that they could'nt answer on the spot, they got back in contact with us once they had found as answer. You can't ask for more than that.
The Live Score Centre on SkyBets homepage sets the standard in terms of usability and speed of updating. The live scores and results feed comes from Sky Sports, the interface looks like a cross between Sky Sports News and Gillette Soccer Saturday, so it looks rather professional and is as reliable a service as we have come across throughout our reviewing process. Highly recommended.
There are a wide range of televised sporting events that Skybet stream via their website, they mostly cover horse racing and football, but there are a tonne of other sports shown such as tennis, golf and many more. There are two levels to their streamed television; for standard SkyBet customers, you can stream all of the above to your desktop. For those who already have a subscription to Sky Sports TV, you can watch all of the content from Sky Sports 1 and 2, including all the premium content, and this costs absolutely nothing! So if you're in Vegas but can't get a ticket to the big fight, you could always watch it on your laptop wherever an Internet connection is available. This is one of the ways that SkyBet have been able to set themselves apart from other online bookmakers, it makes them unique in our opinion.
Mobile betting is very much possible with SkyBet, all you have to do is bookmark the SkyBet mobile address (http://www.skybet.mobi) to your mobile phone and you can access their WAP site wherever you can get a mobile phone signal; you never need to miss getting your bet on just because your better half wants to go shoe shopping on a Saturday afternoon. Hooray!
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