\u201cWe\u2019ve heard from people lying on a beach somewhere in Spain keeping abreast of a game by looking at the internet and seeing what\u2019s happening,\u201d says Nott, who learned to score cricket 15 years ago on paper, a method he still uses while scoring digitally. \u201cThe technology and live scoring make the game more appealing to a wider audience.\u201d<\/p>\n For NV Interactive, building NV Play was a way to democratize technology in a favorite sport of product director Matt Smith, chairman Geoff Cranko and brothers Matt Pickering, managing director, and Gus Pickering, technical director. Previously, the company had developed elite cricket solutions for 15 years, beginning with a scoring platform in 2005 for ESPNcricinfo<\/a>, a global cricket news site, still in use today.<\/p>\n NV then went on to build digital tools for first-class and national teams in the U.K. and New Zealand, also still in use today. For NV Play, the company integrated the same advanced capabilities into a single platform that can scale from serving small, recreational teams to the highest levels of professional cricket. Built on Microsoft Azure, the flexible solution features live scoring, live video, video highlights, ball-by-ball statistics, high-performance analytics and predictive insights \u2013 all to help teams grow and shape the future of cricket.<\/p>\n \u201cHistorically, cricket has been scored on pen and paper,\u201d says Smith, who grew up playing the sport. \u201cDepending on the level of the game, the scores might end up on a spreadsheet that you share around or on a website, if you\u2019re lucky.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re making all the things typically available only to massive cricket clubs with high-performance budgets available to all levels of the game, from grassroots through to the elite.\u201d<\/p>\n Even for famous, professional clubs like Middlesex Cricket<\/a> in London, NV Play has enabled new ways to serve fans and new opportunities for growth. The platform helps the club deliver high-quality video livestreams and video highlights of key moments, which delight fans who can\u2019t attend the club\u2019s four-day matches. The features also serve Middlesex\u2019s many global fans from Australia to India to South Africa.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had a lot of feedback from people who enjoy having an open window on their laptop and being able to duck in and out of a game and get a real feel for what\u2019s going on, without being here in the stadium,\u201d says Rob Lynch, chief operating officer of Middlesex Cricket, which plays at London\u2019s iconic Lord\u2019s Cricket Ground<\/a> venue.<\/p>\n The platform helped Middlesex livestream video of its professional women\u2019s matches for the first time this year. It has also increased engagement on the club\u2019s website, leading to new monetization opportunities.<\/p>\n \u201cWe work hard to keep our website a living, breathing organism and not something that goes dormant and out of date quickly,\u201d Lynch says. \u201cBy incorporating NV Play, we\u2019ve seen a significant increase in traffic to our site.\u201d<\/p>\n Building the solution with Azure DevOps, NV Interactive worked with the England and Wales Cricket Board<\/a> to deliver the solution in the U.K., where it\u2019s branded as Play-Cricket Scorer Pro<\/a>. An NV Play partnership with New Zealand Cricket<\/a> soon followed. To date, the platform has scored more than 30,000 matches involving 90,000 players and captured more than 24 terabytes of video.<\/p>\n It has coded metadata for 18 million balls bowled, including details on batter, bowler, type of hit, runs scored, weather and pitch conditions. In any given week, NV Play is livestreaming scores and video of more than 750 simultaneous matches to an audience of over 2 million people. The scalability of Azure is crucial for handling the enormous usage spikes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every summer, Andy Nott spends his Saturdays on a verdant cricket field with his local team from Calne, a picturesque town in southwest England. But instead of batting and fielding balls, Nott is live-scoring his team\u2019s seven-hour matches, often from inside a scorebox that looks like a garden shed. The job, though largely hidden, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[54,298],"class_list":["post-97904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-azure","tag-transform"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"screen](\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/how-nv-play-is-shaping-the-future-of-cricket-and-making-the-global-game-more-approachable.jpg\")
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