Cricket aficionados bring GIFs to the sport

Photo credit: Rae Allen .

One of the problems with watching a live cricket match is the sheer number of hours you need to be glued to the TV screen. Even the shortest version of the game comfortably lasts more than four hours, whilst longer matches are spread out over a gruelling five days.

Matches last ages, but they can be won and lost during a particularly thrilling period of play.

For cricket fanatics (and there’s a lot of them around the world), the sheer unpredictability of the game is what keeps them hooked. Matches can be won and lost during a particularly thrilling period of play. But, for a game that stretches on for so long, it can be easy to miss such moments if you step away from the screen for a while.

And that’s the gap two techies and cricket aficionados from Pakistan are trying to fill. They created Cricingif, a site that allows cricket fans to watch instant video replays of the moments that matter most: zeroing in on the time a bowler delivers the ball and the ensuing shot. If there’s an important development, like a wicket or a boundary, it’ll also record the crowd’s reaction.

“The idea itself came about after Shahid Rasool, founder of Cricingif, was watching a cricket match and he had to attend to some urgent business for a few minutes. When he came back he saw he had missed a brilliant shot that everyone was talking about in the commentary. That’s when he realized that on-demand functionality is missing in cricket coverage,” explains Qasim Zafar, co-founder.

Qasim was previously associated with taxi app startup Savaree which he helped build along with co-founder Madeeha Hassan. The startup, which was borne out of a social enterprise hackathon, puts on-demand taxis and private vehicles into an app, similar to Uber. However, he quit the venture a few months ago, citing differences over the direction it was taking.

On-demand

Cricket is massive in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Not just in terms of fans – but as an industry too. Estimates suggest the Indian Premier League is alone worth over US$3 billion. If you factor in international cricket games, marquee tournaments like the World Cup, as well as the up-and-coming Pakistan Super League, this figure rises tremendously.

He admits digital rights is still a concern.

Qasim says the site covers all international cricket matches and records the entire game. The entrepreneurs have come up with what Qasim refers to as a “semi-automated” process, whereby a user indicates the part of the game that needs to be recorded, and the algorithm takes care of compression and uploading.

Photo credit: Clive Darra .