Twicket (a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordscricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

match, streamed world-wide on the Internet on Easter Monday, 25 April 2011, with the intention of highlighting the need for high-capacity upstream broadband to enable community content provision. This innovative exercise—claimed to be a world first—caught media attention, making BBC television news,

BBC Radio London BBC Radio London is the Local BBC Radio, BBC's local radio station serving Greater London and its surrounding areas. The station broadcasts across the area and beyond, on the 94.9 FM broadcasting, FM frequency, Digital Audio Broadcasting, DAB, ...

, TalkSport,

Radio New Zealand Radio New Zealand ( mi, Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa), commonly known as Radio NZ or simply RNZ, is a New Zealand public-service radio broadcaster and Crown entity that was established under the Radio New Zealand Act 1995. It operates news and c ...

; and being written about by ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'',

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and ''

Metro Metro, short for metropolitan, may refer to: Geography * Metro (city), a city in Indonesia * A metropolitan area, the populated region including and surrounding an urban center Public transport * Rapid transit, a passenger railway in an urba ...

'' and mentioned on

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Stephen Fry Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer. He first came to prominence in the 1980s as one half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring ...

, the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

Rory Cellan-Jones Nicholas Rory Cellan-Jones (born 17 January 1958; "Cellan" pronounced ) is a British journalist and a former BBC News technology correspondent. After working for the BBC for 40 years, he announced in August 2021 he was leaving the corporation i ...

and

Jonathan Agnew Jonathan Philip Agnew, (born 4 April 1960) is an English cricket broadcaster and a former professional cricketer. He was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, and educated at Uppingham School. He is nicknamed "Aggers", and, less commonly, "Spiro" � ...

(BBC cricket correspondent).

Background

The event was conceived by consultant John Popham after seeing two comments on Twitter; in the first Dan Slee expressed his hopes for keeping up with a local

village cricket Village cricket is a term, sometimes pejorative, given to the playing of cricket in rural villages in England and Wales. Many villages have their own teams that play at varying levels in local or regional club cricket leagues. When organised cric ...

team via Twitter. Then, Chris Conder (@cyberdoyle) mentioned that she was testing a new 30

Mbps In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

, symmetrical internet connection, recently installed by

Lancaster University Lancaster University (legally The University of Lancaster) is a public university, public research university in Lancaster, Lancashire, Lancaster, Lancashire, England. The university was established in 1964 by royal charter, as one of several pla ...

in her village, Wray, in Lancashire, England, one of only three villages in the UK to have a symmetrical

community network A community network is a computer-based system that is intended to help support (usually geographical) communities by supporting, augmenting, and extending already existing social networks, by using networking technologies by, and for, a communit ...

. On learning from Conder that Wray was to hold a special cricket match part of the village's annual Scarecrow Festival, billed as Wray vs. the Rest of the World, Popham decided to broadcast it to the world to demonstrate the potential of high-speed synchronous broadband. He explained: In a retrospective blog post, he explained:

The match

The match was 20 overs per side (the

Twenty20 Twenty20 (T20) is a shortened game format of cricket. At the professional level, it was introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2003 for the inter-county competition. In a Twenty20 game, the two teams have a single innin ...

format), with any batsman reaching 20 runs required to retire. Wray won the toss, and elected to bowl first. After 20 overs, The Rest of the World were 69 for 5, leaving Wray needing 70 runs off 20 overs, which they achieved with a final six, in their eleventh over, winning by 8 wickets. The post-match tug o'war contest (won by Rest of World, 2 out of 3) was also streamed live, as were interviews with various participants.

Media

The event was streamed online on

Bambuser Bambuser AB (publ) is a Swedish company, founded in 2007. Bambuser provides a platform for mobile live video streaming but in 2014, they shifted focus to their B2B offering, providing mobile live video for brands, organizations and app developers. ...

with technical support from Birmingham company Aquila TV who used two

Sony Z1 The Sony Xperia Z1 is an Android (operating system), Android smartphone produced by Sony Mobile Communications, Sony. The Z1, at that point known by the project code name "Honami", was unveiled during a press conference in Internationale Funka ...

cameras and a DSR 350. The stream was watched by a peak of 2,733 viewers. A separate audio commentary was broadcast on-line, by Radio Youthology, attracting 1,780 listeners; their highest figure ever. Also attending were a

BBC North West BBC North West is the BBC English Region serving Cheshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, North Yorkshire (western Craven), West Yorkshire (western Calderdale), Derbyshire (western High Peak), Cumbria (Barrow-in-Furness and So ...

television news crew, whose film was broadcast the same evening. The related

hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

#twicket was trending on Twitter shortly before the end of the match. The match also made a star out of local commenter, Brenda, who drank

Pimm's Pimm's is an English brand of gin-based fruit cup but may also be considered a liqueur or the basis of a sling or punch. It was first produced in 1823 by James Pimm and has been owned by Diageo since 1997. Its most popular product is Pimm's No ...

throughout the game.

References

External links

* * {{YouTube, Dwf6yAhA7DM, Highlights
The Story of #Twicket
– Popham's post-event round-up.
Popham interview on BBC Radio LancasterBBC North West news feature, extracted to Vimeo
Cricket matches Sport in Lancashire Community organizing Internet-based activism Internet-related activism 2011 in England 2011 in cricket Stephen Fry