Cricket, a game which has grown on to become a religion in itself in India. For a cricket loving country like ours, Cricket is a religion and cricketers are the gods. We absolutely hate the idea of missing cricketing events, and when it comes to the mother of all cricketing battles like an India-Pakistan match, that too a crucial one like the first T-20 world cup final clash, it's just something no cricket fan in this country would afford to miss. We Indians love our religions and our cricket too. Rest all can go to hell! (Oh, just kidding :P). So, I started understanding cricket since 1996 world cup, when my dad would come home from work and would just stick over to the television, moreso, because the only channel Doordarshan (DD-1) was the only channel back then, and that too aired the cricket matches live.
Now down some years, the hard reality has bitten into me. And I believe, a lot of other cricket enthusiasts would share my emotions when it comes to getting no time to miss even the most crucial of the matches because we were off to work, and it's almost next to impossible to sit and watch the match right in your cubicle, because you are at work. The same happens with me. Thought, for me, it's not that much of a disappointment, however I can only understand the die-hard cricket lovers would be going through in such a situation. I've got one such die-hard cricket fan who happens to be a senior software developer. For us, it's still a bit flexible, when it comes to things other than work. And thus, I've got a big headphone up at my work desk. And the boss (the director) is absolutely fine with us having our headphones up on out heads, as long as the work doesn't gets hampered.
The event was one such crucial cricketing tournament. While we enjoyed watching the day night matches, the day matches were however have to be left out as there was no way we could watch those matches while in the office. The guy I told you about was considerably upset given his love for cricket. Just then we started checking out our options over the internet, beyond having the option of listening to the live commentary over All India Radio. But watching a match has its own share of excitement, which, neither of us wanted to miss. So, we looked out for some websites that were webcasting TV channels (ofcourse, illegally). These channels came to our rescue. We watched a few of these matches over one of these websites. However it was never safe to be caught watching a cricket match while in office. So, the guy, being a software developer, came up with a great idea. he coded an HTML page, embedded the live feed from the website webcasting the cricket matches, and put up a link to show/hide the video. This meant that if we suspected someone coming, we would just click the link to hide the live feed, and then it will become just a plain harmless looking screen on the browser.
However, while travelling, this is something almost unrealistic, given the prohibitive data charges, plus the coverage gaps for 3G networks that one has to give up the joy of watching matches while on the move. Services like espncricinfo was a good alternative only to be given a shocker that the scores are updated quite late in such sites. Then I came across a new video by UC Web
UC Web has come up with a new service called UC Cricket which integrates updates on cricketing action right inside the browser. Just click the button UC Cricket and you can enjoy live score updates which update automatically, so no need to refresh again and again, match fixtures and results, and videos too. Appears that UC Web has done a great job learning the nerves of cricket loving Indians.
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