A great itch. Being able to watch cricket highlights online
CricketHighlights.com
The cricket world cup was up in 2003 and then unless you bought some
expensive dish network subscription there were hardly any options to
watch the games. Online videos were non existent. And even if one
could watch the game at some friends house, the time zone difference
between USA and cricket playing nations was such that one would have to
watch the game are really odd hours (i remember the world cup games
used to start something like at 3 am). So i always used to wonder,
wudnt it be just easier if one could watch a 30 minute highlight of a
cricket game (the one-day versions are 8 hrs long) online?
Solution Goals:
1. To develop a website, www.crickethighlights.com (i still have the domain) to showcase the game highlights
2. To develop a software solution that would automatically extract
highlight segments from the video broadcast. This would require fair
bit of video processing but wudnt be terribly difficult. One could
check the signal for the score and determine points where a player gets
out or hits a four or a six (just think of them to be like home runs in
baseball).
Status:
1. I didnt do much till 2005. then found a digital video processing
guy who was doing a PhD in the area of video summarization. Sounded
like a perfect guy to build the technology. After many mths of trying,
we cudnt really get the software going. Mainly because he got busy with
his PhD.
2. 2006. Pitched crickethighlights.com as an online video site for a
b-school course on launching new ventures. The idea was very well
received but since this was not cricket and not baseball, the feedback
was that the market is too small.
3. Nothing since then. In 2007 the BCCI, announced it would develope
a portal for doing exactly this for the global cricket audience. Seemed
like this was the end of the road for crickethighlights. However, the
BCCI site never really took off
4. then Youtube happened and suddenly one could see 2-3 minute clips of the cricket games.
So perhaps, crickethighlights.com is now an idea that should retire to the deadpool. What do you think.
2 comments August 23rd, 2008