The release says NBC will own and operate the site. What’s your exact arrangement with Ten Sports?

NBC Universal has become Ten Sports’ exclusive global digital partner. Ten Sports will transfer any existing and future digital rights to its sports programming to NBCU, which will exploit those rights on digital platforms and share revenue with Ten Sports. This arrangement is initially for a year and is extendable upto 2012. Ten Sports will also market digital businesses that NBCU will launch with Ten Sports content to over 75M homes reached by its on-air channels in over 75 territories. NBCU will manage all day-to-day operations. So, tensports.com, which is the main initiative as part of this strategic partnership between the two companies, is run by NBCU (editorial, ad sales, product strategy & development, technical operations, etc.).

NDTV Convergence is also part of this initiative. They’re providing us support with technical operations during live matches. We’re also using their services to prep archival videos. In fact, NDTV is using the same third-generation NBCU technology that we earlier licensed them for their operations while re-launching ndtv.com earlier this year.

The website tensports.com is an old one. What new parts are you introducing?

Tensports.com thus far existed primarily as a corporate Web-site. Now it’s a consumer portal for sports. The experience, therefore, has transformed dramatically.

Our goal is to make the new site India’s premiere, video-rich, sports portal. We have two main video experiences: one for live streaming, and another one for on-demand videos.

The live Webcast will offer consumers in the region an unique and un-paralleled experience. By leveraging the social and interactive elements of the Internet medium, we’re providing some key differentiators compared to the traditional television experience. Fans will be able to watch live cricket matches, simultaneously chat with their Facebook friends & family around the Indian sub-continent & Middle East and discuss the game, watch on-demand highlight clips of key moments of the live game they may have missed, along with interactive stats and scores.

Our product platform for live streaming allows us to take a separate simultaneous live feed, pause & rewind it, and cut highlight clips and post them online with required metadata within minutes of the live action.

The on-demand video experience, on the other hand, is more of a traditional video experience. We’re bringing online several hundred hours of great Ten Sports cricket library content from the past ten years, which will be available for free to fans globally. We’re also in the process of clearing digital rights for cricket videos from eighties and nineties. It’ll be a treat for cricket enthusiasts worldwide.
The site will also offer users latest cricket news, articles and analysis. 

We’ll also offer “quidgets” (quizzes + widgets) - which are cricket video quizzes allowing fun experiences for cricket enthusiasts who can play and share them with their friends.

Lastly, we have plans to offer Web originals like “behind the scenes,” travel blogs & videos, etc, which Ten Sports on-air commentators and production crew will create while they’re, let’s say, in South Africa or Sri Lanka to cover a cricket series. Unlike a traditional on-air linear channel, you don’t have restrictions with programming slot availability on digital, so we can offer users as much content as we can create. Our goal is to ultimately provide sports fans an experience that will allow them to literally “live” each sporting event that Ten Sports covers from different parts of the world.

Audience in today’s digital age is living a multi-platform life. We therefore believe that traditional content production has to adopt and constantly think about three screens (TV, PC & mobile) instead of just one at every step of their planning and execution. We are fortunate that Ten Sports shares NBCU’s multi-platform vision, and is committed to introducing necessary work-flow changes in their current production process to enable this vision.

Is the site going to feature a full-screen experience similar to Hulu? Are you using an advanced compression technology for India where broadband penetration is (relatively) miniscule?

We’re offering a full-screen experience. However, since online video consumption in India is just taking off, and broadband penetration, as you said, is relatively small, we are for now holding off on more advanced technical innovations that we’ve implemented here in the U.S. At launch, we’re encoding videos at

<300kbps to get maximum user coverage. But since we're working off of a very good quality original feed from Ten Sports, even at that low bit-rate, you'll find our live Webcast to be of much better quality compared to what has traditionally been seen in the region.

In the future, we have plans to do adaptive streaming based on user's Internet connection speed. Such dynamic, multiple-rate-encoding of live video streams can provide a user with, say, 256kbps Internet connection, a lower encoded streams compared to live streams to a user on a 2,000kbps connection, who can receive an almost HD quality experience.

With the first match set for tomorrow, how many live matches do you have scheduled for this year?

The beta site is already live, and last week we streamed the two Sri Lanka vs New Zealand T20 cricket matches. The main debut event is the Compaq Cup Tri-Series cricket between India, Sri Lanka and New Zealand starting tomorrow. We’ll be carrying all live cricket matches that Ten Sports has exclusive rights for. The live Webcast schedule is available on the site.