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Watch IPL Live on Mobiles Soon
Techtree News Staff, Apr 20, 2009 1910 hrs ISTBall-by-ball live coverage even over 2G
With the start of the season's biggest sports action - DLF Indian Premier League Season 2 2009 - cricket buffs as usual would be glued to websites, SMS updates, widgets or radio for the latest score updates.
The official IPL site - www.iplt20.com also offers live telecast (not actually live) at http://live.iplt20.com, but works only on Internet Explorer with Silverlight 2 installed. But for those who're on the go, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced the availability of IPL Live on mobile phones!
Zenga Entertainment has bagged exclusive rights from TMT Investment Pvt Ltd. for monetizing mobile content of IPL till 2013. So now Zenga will now stream the ball-by-ball coverage of DLF IPL 2009 directly to mobile handsets with help of ZengaTV. For the official mobile scoreboard, Zenga offers CricZenga application that is available for free to download and use on mobile phones. Note that GPRS charges would be applicable as per the user's data plan.
Now the first question that may come to mind is will Zenga be able to stream ball-by-ball telecast live on all handsets? Even if it does, the premise of handset compatibility should be considered. The claim that mobile TV viewing on 2G over high majority of handsets while 3G still struggles for nationwide availability sounds too good to be true.
Eventually, only mid-level and high-end mobile handsets will be able to handle the live mobile TV streams from the service providers. It would be interesting to see which mobile TV format technology is used for broadcasting multimedia content to the users handsets. Needless to say that watching video over GPRS connection can be costly.
Many have noted that the live coverage from http://live.iplt20.com suffered from infrequent downtimes since the series started. The live coverage is viewable on Firefox browser by installing Moonlight, an Open Source alternative of Silverlight (Thanks to "http://twitter.com/ghoseb" B. Ghose for tip).
The Silverlight works fine on Internet Explorer and Chrome browser. However, the continuous downtime of the DLF IPL Live stream has been kind of disheartening for users who feel promises were not fulfilled. Hopefully, mobile users aren't charged heftily for watching live updates on their mobile by mobile service operators.
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(13) Comments
ANAND
,INDIA, on May 09, 2009 12:43 AM
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Guruprasad Mada
,Bangalore, on Apr 25, 2009 01:43 AM
Deep Sharma
,H.P.(hamirpur), on Apr 23, 2009 09:17 AM
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