Gaming Laboratories International certifies live dealer systems for regulators, and its test list runs to six categories: technical, systems, synchronicity, responsibility, staffing and premises. Two of those six are about the staff and the building.
Live table technology usually gets written up as a solved software problem with a couple of cameras bolted on, and the write-ups agree with each other in a way that starts to feel suspicious the moment you go looking for what they are based on. Table games are a fair distance from what we normally cover, but the engineering questions turn out to be the same ones, and the answers are harder to find than they should be.
What the testing house describes
GLI sets out the pipeline in plain terms. The dealer’s physical actions, it says, “such as the outcome of the roulette wheel spin or the dealing of cards, are translated into data that can be utilized by the software by means of optical character recognition (OCR) technology”, after which a high-definition feed reaches the player and the betting happens on their screen.
The betting happening on the screen is the constraint that shapes everything else. No money moves on the felt, so there are no chips to read, no stacks to count and no bet placement to recognise. The recognition problem is limited to cards and a wheel, which is a far smaller ask than the phrase implies when it turns up in a marketing deck.
Michigan’s Gaming Control Board publishes an unusually detailed technical framework for these games, and its definition of live game equipment covers live game systems, roulette wheels automated and otherwise, card shufflers, automated card readers and dice shakers. Shufflers get a standard of their own. The hardware list reads like an inventory of a casino floor.
Latency, and the absence of numbers
Evolution says its technology is built in-house and stops there. Playtech’s live page offers “the fastest streaming and highest up-time in the industry” without a figure anywhere near it. Pragmatic Play’s studio technology page is about backgrounds, logos and how quickly a branded set can be dressed. Not one of the major suppliers publishes a protocol, a frame budget or a measured delay, which for a product category built entirely on video is a slightly remarkable silence.
The envelope can be pinned down from the people who wrote the protocols. Apple set a design target for Low-Latency HLS of “one to two seconds delay from live at scale over the public internet”, and its own worked example puts a conventional HLS chain up in the twelve-second region. IETF RFC 8825 defines browser real-time media as operating on the order of no more than hundreds of milliseconds. Amazon documents its low-latency tier at under five seconds and its real-time tier at under 300ms, against as much as thirty seconds for ordinary over-the-top streaming.
So anywhere between a few hundred milliseconds and several seconds, depending on architecture nobody is disclosing. Michigan requires operators to demonstrate “acceptable minimum latency” and then declines to define acceptable.
Ports and natives
Roulette, blackjack and baccarat arrived online as ports. They had a physical original and the job was reproducing it, badly at first and then well. Game shows are the other thing entirely: money wheels, ladder climbs, hosted formats where a presenter works a camera rather than a table. Nothing on a casino floor needed reproducing, because there was nothing there to reproduce. They were designed for the pipeline that carries them.
Hippodrome lists blackjack, roulette, baccarat, poker and game shows in its live section, five formats that would need five separate installations on a floor. The popular live casino games under those headings come from third-party studios rather than from anything the operator built, which is how a site adds an entire format overnight and why the last one on that list could exist at all. It is also why two operators can feel oddly similar once you are past the colour scheme. Often enough they are showing you the same room.
Seating limits went the same way. Evolution’s Bet Behind release in 2014 described peak conditions where “there could potentially be hundreds of players ‘betting behind’ any one seat at the table”, and Infinite Blackjack, launched in 2018, deals one common opening hand to an unlimited number of players. Seven chairs turned out to be a property of furniture rather than of the game.
What the money is doing in 2026
Playtech’s 2025 annual report gives seventeen operational studios and around five hundred live tables, which the company says is more than double its count from five years ago. It also claims Family Feud as the first interactive game show broadcast live from a Las Vegas casino floor, and describes green screen work aimed at mobile and low-bandwidth conditions.
The same report describes VZN Blackjack, an RNG-based game that mirrors the look and feel of a live table while removing the need for human dealers and video streaming altogether. Real Dealer Studios has built a business on a related idea, stitching recorded video of dealers into an RNG framework, which it says lets a game resume rather than die when a connection drops. After twenty-odd years of pushing more video down the wire, a decent slice of the current engineering effort is going into working out how little of it you can get away with.
Britain’s technical standards for live dealer studios have not moved in that direction at all. They still require croupier training records, surveillance detailed enough to confirm that dealing procedures were followed, access controls on the secure areas, and game logs collated into statistics that can be analysed for trends relating to game performance, staff and location. Whatever happens to the video, that part of the rulebook assumes a room with people in it.
