SPIN to revolutionise Ashes coverage

SPIN and Hawkeye are to team up to offer cricket fans revolutionary new coverage of this summer’s Ashes on the web. Hawkeye Pulse will offer visitors to spincricket.com the quickest updated scores on the web, as well as offering a range of new interactive features.

The technology, developed by the team behind Hawkeye, has never been used for a sports event in the UK before. However, Pulse has proved a great success during its use in the first two Indian Premier Leagues, as well as the US Open tennis and Australian international games ovr the last winter.

SPIN was the first publication in the world to use the as-seen-on-TV Hawkeye graphics and data, a feature that has been popular from our first issue back in 2005.

Pulse takes that relationship a step further: users will have the latest scores, access to a Hawkeye archive of the day’s play, plus special Hawkeye-themed features analysing the key moments of the day’s play, put together by the SPIN team.

Pulse is the most interactive form of sports coverage on the web, offering users the chance to enter live, interactive Fantasy Cricket-style competitions and to vote on issues surrounding the game, as well as calling up Hawkeye graphics and data.

“Pulse is designed to offer viewers a deeper and richer engagament with a sport,” says Paul Hawkins, the man behind Hawkeye. “It’s built on the same kind of real-time platform used in trading, so the Ashes scores will reach Pulse users quicker than those on any other service.

“It also allows users to express their opinions and to predict certain elements of the game, offering the engagment that a gambling site might offer but without the downside of spending any money!

“We want to offer people a richer and deeper understanding of sport, via match stats and Hawkeye analysis.

“With Spin providing Hawkeye-based news and feature material, the idea is to bring a TV mindset to the internet coverage, offering rolling highlights of all the day’s talking-points.”

Though Pulse on spincricket.com will be a boon to office-bound cricket fans, those watching on TV at home will also get extra value from switching on their computers.

The free-to-enter Fantasy Cricket element of Pulse will have a series of brilliant prizes up for grabs.