| Twicket | |
| Place: | Wray, Lancashire, England |
| Coordinates: | 54.1032°N -2.6076°W |
| Also Known As: | Wray vs. the Rest of the World |
| Filmed By: | Aquila TV |
| Outcome: | Wray beat Rest of World |
Twicket (a portmanteau of Twitter and Cricket) was a village cricket match, streamed world-wide on the Internet on Easter Monday, 25 April 2011,[1] 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,[2] talkSPORT,[3] Radio New Zealand;[4] and being written about by The Guardian,[5] [6] The Observer[7] and Metro[8] and mentioned on Twitter by Stephen Fry,[9] the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones[10] and Jonathan Agnew (BBC cricket correspondent).[11]
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 team via Twitter.[12] Then, Chris Conder (@cyberdoyle) mentioned that she was testing a new 30 Mbps, symmetrical internet connection,[13] recently installed by Lancaster University[14] in her village, Wray, in Lancashire, England, one of only three villages in the UK to have a symmetrical community network.
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,[15] 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:[16]
The match was 20 overs per side (the Twenty20 format), with any batsman reaching 20 runs required to retire. Wray won the toss,[17] 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.
The event was streamed online on Bambuser with technical support from Birmingham company Aquila TV[18] who used two Sony Z1 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 television news crew, whose film was broadcast the same evening.[19]
The related hashtag #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 throughout the game.