I am a big fan of Willow TV, the site that offers livestreams of (almost) every series involving Test-playing nations.  The quality of the streams is fine, the pricing is reasonable and they offer a great on demand service that lets you watch a full day’s play, a highlights programme and play with their Interactive Scorecard. And if you ask me, the latter is just awesome.

Let me say first up that this Interactive Scorecard is not that interactive at all. It really is just one-way traffic, but it does give you a really cool on demand viewing experience.

Willow TV has made every ball that has been bowled available as a single videoclip. Starting with the bowler’s run up and ending with the replay.

So if you wanted to, you could skip directly to the ball being bowled after 81.3 overs and watch that one play out. Or relive the whole of that match changing passage of play, instead of just some of the highlights from tv.

What they have also done (and this is where the awesomeness really comes in) is create playlists of almost every statistic on a scorecard. There is  a playlist with every run made by a team per innings, but also with every run made by each batsmen. And of every ball faced by a batsman.

You can also watch all fours, sixes, wickets, wides and no-balls. Per team and per individual.

Another thing that I really like about this feature, is that it is a live scorecard and is continually updated during the match. So no waiting for hours to see ‘that’ ball again, just make your way over to the Interactive Scorecard to replay it as often as you like.

There is still room for improvement of course, mostly in terms of usability and design, but the basics are very right.

The only thing really lacking is that there are no playlists for every ball bowled by a certain bowler or for maiden overs. But I guess that only goes to show that for most people it is a batsman’s game ..