Get live telecast, commentary & DRS for your local cricket match!

Years back live telecast transformed international cricket and the innovations just kept coming like TV commentary, on screen scoreboards, replays (all of which we have taken for granted) followed by third umpire, ball tracking and of course the ability to view and analyze past matches any time later. When it comes to club cricket, things have been relatively static, but a company called Criconet plans to change all of that. 

Explains Director, Business Development, Suhasni Singh, “Criconet has live streaming, where we live stream local and club matches. We have e-Coaching or online coaching, which is handy when an academy may be shut down due to something like Covid, rain or pollution. People who don’t have access to academies can also use this.”

All this would be a big benefit to the small towns of the world who are looking to gain the expertise of big cities. Founder and President Veer Sagar adds, “We are looking at the bottom end of the pyramid: Like club or inter-school cricket. If they want that to be telecast, this will provide them with a very cheap option to do so.”

Says Sagar, “We designed our own system by which you can put cameras at both ends and telecast it. We further enhanced it with DRS and ball tracking.” There is both hardware and software involved and they have applied for patents at the global level for all of this. There are provisions for both live scoring and live commentary. Power and bandwidth are both major issues in Indian B Towns and that’s why the tech is based on SIM cards.

Continues Sagar, “For DRS, we take two more cameras. You can check run outs and caught behind via rewind and replay. We also have provision for ball tracking and we will keep adding more and more things as we go along. So you can see via both cameras on the Criconet website on your mobile.”

Director, Marketing and PR, Niharika Seth, points out how all this will benefit not just the players and spectators, but the selectors too. “Selectors don’t need to constantly go to the ground. With the Criconet app, they can watch different clubs and different school level matches to scout for talent. This will give them more access to places they would not normally consider going to.”

Criconet aims to create a global cricketing community via their website and app (which is available at Google Store) while small towns may be able to create an IPL kind of ecosystem. While it is an era of work from anywhere and any device Sagar says that their e-Coaching will bring good coaching to everybody, anywhere, anytime, and cheap. Criconet has BCCI recognized coaches available on its website.

Despite problems that arose with matches being cancelled due the pandemic, Criconet has already conducted more than 600 live matches, has more than a lakh subscribers and is looking to expand all over the world. For that they will require further funding and will be looking at VCs.

Check out the freewheeling discussion we had with Veer Sagar, Suhasni Singh and Niharika Seth over this novel concept…