The demise of the high street bookies’ shop may be about to be hastened, with the launch of a broadband racing service from Trinity Mirror, Racing UK and five bookmakers, which will offer live online streamed coverage of 4,000 races a year direct to people’s home computers, from where they can also bet.

The service was dismissed today by William Hill, which has the largest chain of high street betting shops, as not being a threat, despite Hills having enjoyed what it describes as "exponential growth" in its internet betting operations, which already accounts for 20 per cent of its business.

Yet market trends suggest that the days of smoke-filled "turf accountants" shops, where habitués watch live television coverage of every race staged around the country and pore over copies of yellowing racing pages plastered to the walls, before hurriedly completing betting slips before the start of the 3.45 at Doncaster, may well be numbered.

The service from Trinity Mirror’s Racing Post.co.uk website was thought to be aimed at a launch date of September 1, although this has now been put off ("a matter of weeks, rather than months", a source said today), as the technology undergoes tests.

In her speech in the company’s interim report last month, Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, spoke enthusiastically of broadening her company’s business into new media, saying, "Five of the UK's leading bookmakers have been selected to partner the venture. Each of these partners will have a prime position on the site and consumers will also be able to watch the video stream in a bookmaker-specific site".

The service will utilise the television rights of Racing UK, the existing racecourse-owned subscription channel, at 31 race courses around the country. These include Aintree, where the Grand National is staged every April, traditionally the biggest single betting day on the calendar, Cheltenham, with its week-long National Hunt Festival each March, Epsom, the home of the Derby, and the headquarters of racing, Newmarket.

Earlier this year, the Racing Post and Racing UK offered a pilot of the site for the Grand National. In the nine days leading up to the race, it recorded more than 2.4 million page impressions from 157,000 unique users.

Central to the new service will be that, before users watch their selected race, they will be able to call up form and analysis from the newspaper’s site and have the chance to compare the odds from the bookmakers and to place their bets online.

Trinity Mirror has yet to announce which bookies will be featured on the site, having tendered for offers to about 40 companies in June. Each participating bookmaker is also expected to feature the service on their own website.

At present, the Racing Post site includes comparative odds from Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, bet365 and betdirect, among others.

The tender process for the new site was handled by Sportev, a provider of technical facilities for new media sports provision.

Will Muirhead, Sportev’s chief executive, said that the broadband service would be aimed at a potential "new community of users": younger punters who would not necessarily fit the profile of subscribers to the Racing Channel, but who nevertheless would like the opportunity to watch races and bet online.

However, he said that these were unlikely to include people at work in City institutions, many of which have imposed filters to prevent employees from watching video-streamed images while at work.

Old-style forms of gambling are already struggling in the face of the new wave onslaught of the internet and National Lottery: the football pools companies, which a decade ago enjoyed the custom of around 900,000 punters on a weekly basis, have seen that whittled down to around 100,000. The Lottery’s low-stake betting, with potentially vast jackpot prizes, and the comparative ease of entry, has seen it marginalise the pools.

With the increasing penetration of internet broadband access, it is not difficult to foresee a similar impact on the traditional betting shop, although David Hood, William Hill’s head of PR, today disputed that the service would present a threat to his company, which is not part of the package.

"We’ve just bought 624 shops from Stanley," Mr Hood said, referring to May’s £504 million purchase that saw Hills, which already had 1,600 betting shops, overtake the Hilton-owned Ladbrokes as having the country’s largest high street bookmaking presence. "We wouldn’t have done that if we thought this wasn’t good for our business."

In 2004, bookmakers’ shops experienced a 72 per cent increase in the volume of betting business.

"Ultimately, internet users will be able to get good quality pictures of races on their computers," Mr Hood said, "but it all depends on the technology. At present, even with broadband, the quality of streaming can be a bit mixed, and the technology is still some way away for the ordinary punter."

Mr Hood dismissed reports of the betting shop’s death as being premature, and he certainly did not foresee the Racing Post site as being a threat. "They are dealing with a very different market, with a different punter profile. The people who bet online are more like traders than punters," he said. "The betting shop will be around for a good while yet."

The company, which runs 178 bookmakers' shops throughout Ireland and Britain, warned that it had been hit further by adverse sporting results since the start of the second half, though said it remained confident of hitting full-year targets. Profit before tax slipped to €18.4 million (about £13m) in the six months to June 30, from €18.7 million, on turnover up 27 per cent to €704.1 million after the company opened 17 new betting shops. Financial analysts had forecast pretax profit of €17.7 million. Paddy Power went on to say it was pleased with the development of its online poker business launched during the period, having seen strong growth through the summer months.

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