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New Delhi, June 11: In a major sports media
merger, leading broadcaster ESPN has acquired pioneering cricket
website Cricinfo. "Growing our business in the online world is
vital for us to serve sports fans. Cricinfo is a tremendous
property with a great fan base and it will be a strong addition
to ESPN," Russell Wolff, managing director of ESPN
International, said in a statement on Cricinfo today.
"Cricinfo has developed into a significant
cricket brand in its own right, combining huge global popularity
with strong commercial success. ESPN is a major sports
broadcaster and international rights holder and will provide the
perfect environment for Cricinfo to further realise its enormous
potential," Mark Getty, director of the Wisden Group which owns
the website, said.
Cricinfo had its inception in 1993 as an
online community of cricket fans supplying cricket-related
information on a voluntary basis. Beginning with scorecards and
live scores, the portal offered users audio and video streaming
of cricket matches. After few years of independent existence,
Cricinfo received its first major investment in 1999 from Sify,
an Indian IT company, which acquired a majority stake in the
company. It changed hands four years later when the Wisden
Group, which then ran its own cricket website wisden.com, bought
it. (Agencies)
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