An quick update from last time when we were just setting up Cricingif. We seem to have underestimated our premise that there would be a market for on-demand cricket coverage. Our platform’s users are growing extremely rapidly, in a month we’ve already hit 100,000 users. And keeping pace with that sort of demand is proving to be a challenge.
We’ve developed a clipping system that automatically extracts a video clip for each ball and then waits for an operator to enter the score on that ball. Effectively, we provide live cricket scores alongside play by play highlights. We can add some computer vision-fu to automate this scoring but considering how many scores are reversed in cricket, it’s more complexity than currently worth.
We’re starting off in Pakistan, and the infrastructure and state of handheld devices prohibits HD streaming. So our focus on the Cricingif app is to build a light web/mobile client and minimize data consumption. I’ve been working with the FFmpeg library to minimize our file sizes, which are down to about 1.5-2MB per clip.
A side effect of our focus on building a light client is that we now provide the fastest live cricket scores online. I don’t know how, but we are on average 10 seconds faster than ESPNCricinfo and around 5 seconds faster than Cricbuzz. Both of these are giants in the field, billion-dollar companies. It is surprising that their scoring is so delayed as we are using laggy online streams for scoring.
My cofounder hacked together an automated Twitter uploading service that has gone viral. Journalists, commentators and other influencers from the world of cricket now regularly use our tweets. The philosophy of providing bite-sized, replay-able match coverage in real time seems to be working out.
I’ll keep updating on what’s new at Cricingif. In the meanwhile, follow us on Twitter!
For more on what I’ve done, do check out my resume
Get in touch with me at: qasimzafar AT outlook DOT com
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