It’s the end of February. No matter what time you switch on the TV, there is a cricket match going on: be it the Pakistan Super League or West Indies taking on against Sri Lanka. Life’s good.

Then it all comes crashing down within just a week and you are back to the CT17 highlights. And along with it, much of the activity on sports websites. One of them, I would like to introduce in today’s edition.

Cricingif is a Lahore-based sports website that wants to be the go-to portal for everything related to cricket, be it the news about upcoming fixtures, scores or interviews with your favourite cricketers. Most importantly, it shows real-time highlights in Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) - the name says it all. Plus, there is the gamification aspect, that lets you play fantasy league allowing you to bet on dream players to make it big.

Whether you want to revisit the 2010 trauma caused by Mike Hussey or the sweet memories of Pakistan sealing a maiden series win against the West Indies in Misbah and Younis’s last appearance, Cricingif is the platform. Over the years, it has built a significant audience with its live score updates, videos and fantasy league that in the 2020 PSL reportedly recorded 2m teams.

The startup was launched in August 2016 by Shahid Rasool — a techie from FAST NUCES, currently pursuing MBA at the London School of Business. “At the time, not much work was being done in cricket on the digital side in the country, it was mostly broadcast-heavy. Plus, the international platforms were biased towards India so I felt the need for our own product that we could rely on and could be followed internationally,” recalls the founder.

“The game’s DNA has changed over the last two decades, with the introduction of a completely new format and our idea was to bring similar innovation in the way it is followed,” he adds.

But this business needs big bucks to buy all those licences - a tough feat for a startup. So much so that in the neighbouring country, even the giant SonyLiv can’t broadcast India’s matches as those rights are held exclusively by Hotstar. In Pakistan too, a brand as famous as Geo Super has struggled a great deal due to the same issues.

And while we are at it, let’s go through the landscape in the digital arena too. Unsurprisingly, there too, the two biggest players are quite well-backed: Cricinfo is owned by ESPN while Cricbuzz by the Times of India Group, and both have been in the industry for decade(s), giving them an extremely enviable database.

How does a much younger company, with far fewer resources, make its place in such an industry?

“ESPNCricinfo, though puts up excellent content, is a dinosaur and hasn’t innovated with time so it was no wonder that Cricbuzz, which entered the market more than a decade later, surpassed it easily. And this is where we come in: introducing new things such as the real-time highlights. Plus, both the platforms tend to censor Pakistani content, which became quite clear by February 2019, and that again makes our presence imperative,” says the CEO.

The list doesn’t end here. Within the complementary services, there is the state-run PTV Sports, and the streaming website/app Tapmad which usually broadcasts Pakistan’s matches and even had some sort of prediction game during the PSL. And finally the tonnes of YouTube channels surfacing up, like Rameez Raja’s, that again offer plenty of content.

“They are mostly into streaming, which is not our line of work. As for content producers, no big market can grow with just one player so I welcome these newer channels,” claims Rasool.

Enough said about the overall landscape, so now let’s turn to what usually makes anyone competitive: the finances. Cricingif has a couple of revenue streams in place, including sponsorship from brands like Pepsi, Jubilee etc, as is quite common in sports content. But that is not the most sophisticated way of monetising for a tech-enabled startup, is it? That is why they also have a planned business-to-business income source - selling their in-house live scoring software, which Rasool says is the fastest - in addition to online ads and premium model for business-to-consumers.

The startup kicked off with a seed investment of $2 million in 2016 and raised another $500,000 last year through convertible note. Now, Rasool is eyeing the next round.

Being the only such home-grown platform in a cricket-frenzied nation has been a welcome development, but Rasool doesn’t want to stay local and plans to scale it as a reliable alternative to the existing goliaths.

A platform that breaks away from the shackles of the big three and brings the deserving representation to the rest of the cricketing world.

The writer is member of staff: m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2020