Launched in 2008, Cricket Nirvana was probably the first website in India to experiment with live streaming of Cricket matches. It began with a subscription model, and later switched to an an advertising supported public feed. Tensports, supported by NBC Universal, later followed suit, and recently, YouTube acquired rights for the Indian Premier League, and plans to stream it free. MediaNama spoke with Jose Felix, VP(New Media), Nimbus Communications to understand better their experience with live streaming, the advertising model, and whether it's been a viable business proposition so far. Why did you switch from subscription to ad supported live streaming? With the subscription model we were predominantly targeting people from India because rights for US and other places are syndicated to other broadcasting companies. This is a space with no history, and we realized that in a country like India, people are not willing to pay for content even if it is Cricket. You cannot generate enough revenue to cover the CDN cost. After 2-3 series, we started free streaming. World wide none of the sporting events are free, all the events go on subscription. We are trying out different combinations, but the one that worked is VDOPIA's VLive Techonology, through which we were able to crack in-stream videos during live stream, pre-rolls and mid-rolls. I think we started during the India - Australia series, and were able to stabilise this particular service from the second series onwards. Prior to that we had two series for free, and the revenue…
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