The Problem

This article is about the shortsightedness of broadcasters and the cricket boards not doing enough for their cricket fans online.

Cricket boards have asked Google to remove links to sites that violate copyright by providing live cricket streams.

At first, it might appear as though what the cricket boards have is reasonable; they own broadcast rights exclusively and want to maximize their profits. One will have to dig in a bit to see why they are wrong.

A majority of the cricket matches, as of now, are NOT shown online. Getting cricket on the television can be hard if you do not live in a cricket playing nation. The fans that try to go for live streams do so because they do not get their cricket on telly. If you try to block cricket online, cricket fans don’t get their cricket, period!

The Alternative

IPL, apart from getting exciting by the year, also is a trend setter. BCCI, Time of India and YouTube brought great coverage of the matches online. The page that carried the stream on YouTube was covered with loads of ads; this is in addition to the in-stream ads. All the involved parties probably made tons of money. This has got to be the alternative going forward. Get YouTube and their massive content delivery infrastructure on board, stream ALL matches and get your revenue from ads.

And, while you are getting your act together, allow enterprising people to stream cricket matches online and keep cricket fans happy. Simple!