World’s richest cricket body, BCCI, launches their website

Can you believe the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the world’s richest cricket sports body, did not have a website till now? In Nov 2007 BCCI invited bids for building their website,

Under this ITT (invitation to tender), the wining bidder will be required to perform the functions of designing, developing, hosting and operating the bets of breed web portal,’ Secretary Niranjan Shah said in the tender notice being published in newspapers.

The bid document can be acquired at a non-refundable and non-adjustable amount of Rs. 500,000 from the BCCI headquarters at the Wankhede Stadium here from Thursday.

‘The project scope includes (but is not limited to):

1. Exploiting existing content to create packages for driving subscription revenues,
2. Creating new content,
3. Hosting, production and ongoing operations of the portal,
4. Generating traffic, users and revenues to the site,
5. Maintaining the books of accounts and providing detailed information regarding all the revenues whenever requested by the BCCI management,’ says the tender notice.

The bidding price was approximately $50m for 3 years. “Experts” had estimated revenue potential of $15m a year from the portal. One of the articles stated “None of the big boys – Reliance, Tata..were interested”. Finally, Global Cricket Ventures (I could not find their URL, at least not easily) won the tender to build the website.

Looks like they have great plans and know what needs to go on the website. But what about the domain name? bcci.tv !! What were they thinking? BCCI is the richest sports body in India and possibly one of the richest in the world. Could they not afford to buy bcci.com or bcci.in – both are parked domains.

I subscribed to their mailing list. It is smooth mainly because the mailing list part has been outsourced (to mailchimp.com). But were you aware BCCI is “D”ubai based 😉 ? Well, that is what you see on the confirmation pages of the mailing list,

The look and feel of the site are simple and clean. I think it will please the readers. The mobile part seems to be completely missing. Reports say that the site has many errors (wrong links etc). I think that was very much avoidable but you can get away in the online world by saying it is “Beta” version 😉

Update (Jan 2019): Google encourages (rather mandates) sites to have a SSL certificate. BCCI is yet to move their website to htts://bcci.tv. SSL certificates are available for free.