[listenallyall]

You may not care about DRF, but it is the sole source for a typical horseplayer to get reliable information about the horses, without which, these players would have zero guidance and likely abandon the sport.

DRF makes racing data easily accessible. If it was left to the tracks, which are independent entities (unlike NFL/NBA/MLB), an horseplayer would have to compile past performances from dozens of sources. The fields of a single day's race card may have run at 30 or more individual venues, in aggregate. Even if that data were free (well, the result charts and replay videos are already free, so technically this is already possible) if would take a ton of work to assemble it all in a digestible format -- which the DRF does for 6 bucks.

I don't believe HK offers free data that is not available from American tracks. There is no API, the result charts are less detailed than American tracks. If info was so freely available to everyone, how would someone like Bill Benter gain such a huge advantage? Why wouldn't he replicate his methods in the US? Probably because the US makes MORE data available.