February 21st, 2007

Cricket World Cup 2007 – Online Streaming Telecast or Webcast options

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Note: Stay away from these fraud streaming websites. If you are satisfied with audio commentary, then look no further than IndiCast’s free live commentary. It is an aam-aadmi commentary. You can join in the commentary too through the chat window.

The Cricket World Cup 2007 is less than three weeks away and I am again stuck in a land which doesn’t know what cricket is all about let alone having primetime programming available. Even football (no soccer, mind you!) which is popular all over the world has a difficult time attracting fans and eyeballs in the U.S. Importing Beckham had a flicker of interest in the news media which expectedly focused more on his flamboyant hair and celebrity Posh Spice wife. Anyway, it is time again to scour the web for online webcast cricket options at least to see the important games. Also, it doesn’t help that the majority of important games will be played when things will be at its craziest best unlike last year’s football world. I promise not to indulge in sending you on any wild goose chases [pity that people still get suckered in each time a cricket match is on].

First of all, make sure you are aware of the schedule. The World Cup spans more than a month and with a host of little league teams you don’t want to waste precious bandwidth on such games. But with sporadic antics from Kenya or Bangladesh, you never know. If it helps, the Super 8 stage only starts on March 27 with the final slated more than a month later on April 28. I feel for the loss of productivity in India at that time; we must make cricket popular in China if we have any hope of competing against them economically.

If you are rich enough, you better opt for Dish Network’s World Cup package for $199 which in my opinion is a steal considering that the last time the world cup was around, it was close to $300. But trust me, if you wait until after the preliminary stages, they might offer a rest-of-the-World-Cup packages for at least $50-75 less. If enough of you are interested, do what our apartment did last World Cup. Buy the package and ask your friends to chip in. The only problem is you have to host the game parties. We had 35 people for the final and might have made a profit if we wanted to. Of course everyone lost interest once Australia was done batting and Sachin got out in the first over.

Ok! no money and no interest in begging your friends to chip in, go to the next step – online streaming television or webcasts. Mind you, plenty of sites purport to offer such service but hardly any do. Don’t bother going to Desi Cricket Live which worked fine then but now is a link farm with spammy Google Ads.


Cricket Next has reportedly bought rights to webcast the World Cup globally. But no details are available right now on pricing or platform compatibility. But you can be sure that so many people hitting their servers, they might just buckle down at crucial moments. They have a tab in the second column [from the right] where it says live matches. They have a blogs section, forums, and even videos but I don’t see a webcast tab yet.

A simulation of cricketing action powered by Flash might not be the real things but close if you have no other options. ESPN Star simulates ball-by-ball action in their Live Off Tube [Live Flash Cricket Centre]. But now for the real stuff:

I assume Sony SET MAX [and Doordarshan, of course] is telecasting the matches in Asia/India and is sub-licensing the rights outside Asia to Star Sports. So any online streaming service that has Star Sports in its channel lineup will possible have cricket. I’ll point you to my earlier post on streaming television channels via the TVU Player. It worked perfectly fine for the football world cup and if the matches are shown on the same channels which include ESPN, ESPN, Star Sports, etc. You can see the detailed instructions I listed to download and run the TVU Player.

I chanced upon another streaming player, Sopcast which also acts like the TVU Player [via]. Sopcast streamed Star Sports without any problem. Of course, you need a fast Internet connection and little patience to let the stream buffer first. You have to be aware that such streaming channels may not be entirely legal so download and watch at your own risk.

Other streaming television sites are Channelking and Streamick. The first one mostly has American channels and may not have cricket but Streamick has ESPNStarsports, Fox Soccer Channel, and UK-based Sky Sports News. The video quality is not great though. But keep an eye out on these channels anyway.

Note of caution – don’t try to stream from all sites at once. You may just slow it down for all channels.

I hope this helped. I’ll update the post if I find any other options for streaming television or webcast for the World Cup. Let me know in the comments if you have any other sites/services that you rely on.

Quicklinks:

Dish Network’s World Cup Package – $199
ESPN-Star Simulated Flash Graphics
TVU Networks Player [instructions]
Sopcast
Streamick
Channelking

Update#1: Chetan has found an ideal deal in Europe. But it comes at a hefty price of 325 euros. But this deal is for conventional TV.

Update#2: Thanks to Andrew, I found LiveSportson.TV (smart use of the dot TV suffix). It seems to work fine and the upside is that we can pay-per-match. However, the downside is that, it costs $159 for the entire World Cup and $15 per match. Considering that Dish Network is only slightly more expensive at $199, I would prefer conventional television (can’t trust overburdened servers, right?). But if you are a casual follower, then buying a choice few matches is a better option. Better hope the video doesn’t freeze at a crucial moment.

by Patrix | on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 12:00 pm | Posted In Recommended, Sports, Technology, Television . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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