The official website of the Indian Premier League -- www.IPLt20.com will provide an interactive video experience to those would like to view match coverage online. The videos will broadcast using Micrsoft s Silverlight platform, which is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for viewing rich interactive applications on the Web. Microsoft India claims this to be the largest online broadcasting cricketing event in history, offering viewers a novel way of viewing twenty20 matches live online.
Cricket fans will be able to watch live coverage of IPL 2009 matches on www.IPLt20.com, allowing them to watch what they want, when they want. The matches will be broadcast live in high quality format, giving IPL followers access to more than 500 hours of on-demand video content. The website will also enable picture-in-picture controls and a customizable Silverlight player to offer a personalized experience.
In addition, the website will enable picture-in-picture controls and customizable player to offer a personalized experience. The website will also provide a customized Internet Explorer 8 for IPL fans to stay connected with all the action. Using IE8 features like Web Slices and Accelerators, fans can speed up video and image search and get instant updates from the website.
According to statistics revealed by the IPL, last year IPLT20.com recorded 50.2 million page views, 10 million visits and 5 million unique visitors all this over a period of just six weeks. This season the website is expecting register 400 million page views, 45 million visits and 10 million unique visitors.
Features on www.IPLt20.com
The image gallery is built using Microsoft s Deep Zoom technology, which will enable users to view high resolution images and allow them to even browse, filter and sort photographs using meta-tags.
The Live Match video player has unique advertising support, which is supposed to be non-obstructive and allowing viewers to watch live action for free.
The video gallery is an on-demand interactive gallery using Silverlight showcasing video highlights. Videos can also be shared with friends (community features are yet to built into the website) or commented upon.
The website is also said to provide multiple video streams, based on user preferences and bandwidth.
This opportunity must come as a breath of fresh air for Microsoft. Almost a year ago, Microsoft managed to bag a contract with Major League Baseball Advanced Media to host all coverage based on its Silverlight platform. A few weeks ago, however, due to undisclosed reasons that ranged from instability, glitches and inability to remove the restriction on user installation rights of the Silverlight player, MLBAM discontinued the use of Microsoft's platform. The conflict resulted in Adobe Flash winning favour of the most successful online service.
In continuation to Part 2 of this series "How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond", Abhishek M. Gupta, VP (Technology) of Lime Spot Technology, in Part 3, discusses how to increase traffic by by "affiliate marketing". Read on...
del.icio.us
Digg.com
MyWeb
Newsvine.com
