Kentucky Lottery Rolls Out ‘Connected Play,’ Bridging Gap Between Online And Retail

In April, the Kentucky Lottery celebrated 10 years of legal online lottery play in the state. One month later, it has launched its latest iLottery innovation, a feature called “Connected Play” that unifies online play and retail play in a single place within the Kentucky Lottery app.

“It’s all about making lottery products convenient for players,” Kentucky Lottery President and CEO Maggie Garrison said in an interview this week on local ABC station WHAS 11’s Great Day Live. “What consumers are used to — convenience, ease. That’s what Connected Play does.”

Connected Play enables lottery customers to house their tickets and their digital wallet in one place on their mobile device, and then use the feature when buying tickets in person as well. It works for either draw games like Powerball and Mega Millions or scratch-offs.

“It really pulls together the online channel with the retail channel,” Garrison explained while being interviewed from a retail store with a lottery machine. “So you can fund your online wallet, you can spend online … or you can come here to a retail location.”

On the cutting edge

Kentucky was the fourth state to launch online lottery play, so it’s not unusual to see it ahead of the curve with the Connected Play product.

“We’re really proud to be one of the first to offer this feature, and it’s so important for us to continue to innovate,” Garrison added. “We have such an important impact on the state, and so we want to keep growing the funds that we contribute for education.”

In Kentucky, 20% of lottery ticket sales go to the state to fund college scholarships and grant programs.

There’s less competition for the gambling dollar in Kentucky than there is in most states, as the Bluegrass State does not have any traditional casinos. The home state of the Kentucky Derby does, of course, have quite a few racetracks. And retail and online sports betting have both been regulated in the state since September 2023.

Of course, any positive Kentucky Lottery news goes a long way toward helping push the tale of Georgetown, Kentucky-based Powerball winner James Farthing a little further from the top of Google searches.