Considering the growing popularity of smartphones, tablets and notebooks in India, it’s no surprise that the digital medium is going to be the next battle ground for companies this cricket season.
Taking a cue from YouTube, leading cable and satellite broadcaster ESPN Star Sports has decided to stream all matches live on its website for free. YouTube saw 93,000 subscribers and over 50 million views when it streamed the last edition of Indian Premier League matches.
Gaming companies like Zapak, Nazara and Jump have launched several games on the mobile and internet platforms. Jump, the official partner of the International Cricket Council (ICC) for mobile gaming, has launched ICC World Cup 2011 games. Apart from local audience, it is targeting the Indian diaspora spread across the globe. The game will be priced at Rs 99 in India and $5 in other markets. “We expect a million downloads within the month,” says Salil Bhargava, CEO, Jump Games.
Mobile community mig33, too, has launched migcricket, a chat-based cricket game, where players can join the game by paying with mig33 credits. Mohit Gundecha, head of India operations at mig33, says they are looking to engage users from Tier-II cities. “The game is easy to play and doesn’t even require a smartphone,” explains Gundecha. mig33 has launched special virtual cricket merchandise around the World Cup as well. It claims it registered about 250,000 users last year and expects the number to rise substantially during the World Cup.
Zapak Games, the licensing and merchandising arm of Zapak, has developed Cricket Power, a PC game that will be available for players through both online and offline mediums. Vaibhav Odhekar, business head of Zapak Games, claims, “Even non-cricket enthusiasts will be celebrating these events. We aim to reach the masses with this official game and have hence priced it reasonably at Rs 299.” The game CDs are scheduled to hit 5,000 Zapak retail stores this week.
For the cricket-crazy nation, companies like HCL Technologies have launched a new application, Xplore Cricket WC2011, available both for Android and iPhone mobile devices. There are four major sections in the application: first one is information related to matches, second is teams and players, followed by match venues and live scores for fans to keep a track of their teams’ performance.
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Sistema Shyam TeleServices Ltd (SSTL), which operates telecom services under the MTS brand, will provide all Meru cab users in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Hyderabad a MBlaze dongle for free internet surfing with unlimited data download. Leonid Musatov, chief marketing officer, SSTL, says, “With the Cricket World Cup round the corner, such a service would also enable cricket enthusiasts travelling through the city to connect their laptops via mobile broadband and check out the latest match scores and updates.”
Even Smith and Jones, the company which has instant noodles, soups, ketchups in its portfolio, has launched a special YouTube channel, ‘Cricket ka Tadka’. The internet channel sports series of videos that teach basic cricket. The company is also launching this across other platforms like videos on demand on DTH, IPTV and mobile networks. According to Ajay Gupta, CMD, Capital Foods, this is first of the many such initiatives the company plans to launch.