Pomegranate and YouTube Offer Live Tweeting for Globally Popular Cricket League.
March 13, 2010 by Renee Gannon
Pomegranate, which collaborated with YouTube to offer live Twitter feeds during YouTube’s popular U2 and Alicia Keys concerts in 2009, has announced the development of the Twitter-Chat gadget for the Indian Premier League’s (IPL) YouTube Channel.
The league, initiated in 2008 by the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) includes eight teams of players from various countries. It was named by Forbes as the “hottest sports league in the world” and has been valued at $4.1 billion by the UK-based brand consultancy Brand Finance.
Pomegranate’s Twitter-Chat gadget enables real-time engagement during live streaming events, allowing visitors to interact with each other via chat while simultaneously feeding updates to their twitter.com profile. The application aggregates live Twitter feeds to create a community experience for fans viewing an event from home.
The IPL channel also includes a dynamic XML news feed next to the Pomegranate Twitter-Chat gadget that promotes real-time conversation in conjunction with the live-streaming sports action.
The entire IPL season will be streamed around the world on YouTube, except in the U.S., where matches will be time-delayed and made available 15 minutes after the match ends. The third season of the IPL is set to begin in India March 12 and last 45 days. It will be the first sporting event ever to be broadcast live on YouTube.
Participants can log in to Pomegranate’s Twitter gadget on the IPL channel page right below the video to be part of the conversation as it happens. They can keep up with the discussion of the IPL on Twitter with the YouTube IPL hashtag (#youtube_ipl).
And as they say over at YouTube, “We'll be watching the donkey drops, the five-fers, the flippers and floaters, the half-yorkers and slow sweeps — and cheering alongside you!”
