The Hindu Business Line : It's a CASe of cricket blues in Chennai!

Media professionals reckon cricket enthusiasts in the city opted for alternatives, however cumbersome, including that of watching with a set-top-box-enabled friend!

Chennai , Dec. 16

TWO Chennai cricketers, Sadagopan Ramesh and L. Balaji, might have narrowly missed being part of the Indian team that made history in Australia on Tuesday. At least, they didn't miss the action like others in the city. For a majority of Chennai's cricket enthusiasts, it was a vague reminder of the times when live cricket coverage was still largely a thing of the future. But, then, at least they could listen to the radio commentary!

With an estimated 20,000 set-top box homes (out of nearly 12 lakh homes) that may have had access to the match, media professionals reckon cricket enthusiasts in the city opted for alternatives, however cumbersome, including that of watching with a set-top-box-enabled friend!

For many who haven't still experienced the thrills of online trading, Tuesday's attempts at tracking a `quasi-ticker' in a lonely corner of free-to-air news channels would have been quite an effort.

Media industry sources said news channels would have scored high on the cricket enthusiasts' popularity chart, what with them providing live scores too.

It would, however, be a while before the actual viewership patterns emerge, they pointed out.

Earlier Test matches have notched up television rating points of eight-nine in the city, which translates into a TV viewing audience of about 1 lakh at any point of time during a match. "Tuesday's audience wouldn't be even worth capturing," added an industry source.

Radio Mirchi, which has been providing updates of cricket scores in recent months, said, in the present situation, its value-added service provides extra value to listeners. The radio station's cricket updates, presented every 15 minutes on match days, are nationally sponsored by LG, Visa and Usha.

Another beneficiary seems to have been cellular service providers, such as Reliance India Mobile.

According to its spokesman, the company's score updates service on R-World, its value-added data application feature, has registered 12 million hits a day approximately over five days. The past two days saw a 20 per cent increase, though city-wise data was unavailable.

Despite the fact that the match started early in the day Indian-time, the hits were as much as a match played in India, said the spokesman.

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