RadioShack’s deal with Leap relies on a hybrid mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model. Rather than function independently from its network partner, RadioShack will feature Leap’s mobile brand, Cricket Communications, in the name of its service: “RadioShack No-Contract Wireless powered Cricket.” The electronics retailer will also resell Cricket’s voice and data plans instead of buying minutes and megabytes wholesale and developing its own pricing models. Those plans will included access to Cricket’s popular music subscription service Muve.

But RadioShack will only sell a subset of Cricket’s devices and have – at least for 30 days – exclusive rights to its own smartphone:  The Huawei Mercury Ice. The Android 2.3 handset will sell for an unsubsidized price of $150 and will be coupled with either a $50 or $60 monthly no-contract plan. Both plans come with unlimited voice and SMS, but the cheaper one will come with 1 GB of data before Cricket’s throttling policies kick in. The $60 plan comes with a soft monthly data cap of 2.5 GB.

RadioShack will also sell the Huawei Pillar feature phone with plans starting at $25 a month, and said it will begin selling two additional handsets by the end of September.

The launch means RadioShack is no longer just a reseller of devices for the big U.S. carriers. It will now resell services, from which it can take in a monthly revenue stream rather than just an initial sales commission. For Leap, the deal means a big opportunity to get Cricket service into the hands of new customers. According to the Wall Street Journal, RadioShack has more than 4,400 US locations plus an additional 1,500 kiosks at Target stores.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Bekathwia

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Subscribers will also be able to catch up on previous matches, and non-paying users can watch highlight clips for free. Existing Willow.tv subscribers can get their accounts validated by linking up their YouTube and Willow.tv accounts, and the company promises that YouTube streaming will “further enhance” the quality and reliability of its existing offering. Willow will still offer subscribers the option to watch games on various connected and mobile devices.

Paid subscriptions on YouTube haven’t been officially announced by the site yet, and YouTube PR wasn’t available for comment on the matter. However, this isn’t the first time YouTube has been experimenting with letting people pay for its live streaming offering. The site also streamed a mixed martial arts and kickboxing event called Glory live from Russia at the end of June, which was only available as pay-per view.

YouTube’s competitors Ustream, Justin.tv and Stickam all have been offering PPV for some time now. However, YouTube’s massive user base and its payment platform could make the site an interesting option to sports leagues who want to bypass or complement existing pay TV offerings. We probably won’t see the MLB or NBA embrace these options any time soon, but foreign sports leagues with smaller footprints in the U.S. market could embrace it to cater to expats and international sports fans alike.

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“The 3G thing on tablets is bogus. Nobody wants to pay for that data.”

That’s from IDG analyst Bob O’Donnell recently in Computerworld, opining that the high price of data plans are why 3G tablets are gathering dust in inventory. O’Donnell suggested those lagging sales will force carriers to offer a single data plan that covers a family of devices. That solution makes a lot of sense, but I think there could also be a sizable market for affordable prepaid tablets. For more on this, see my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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This year, Willow.tv subscribers will get an added bonus with new multiplatform video capabilities through which they can access live streams not just on PCs and laptops, but on a wide range of mobile devices and an increasing number of connected TVs and broadband set-top boxes.

Willow.tv is just the latest streaming sports firm to go with a multiplatform strategy, following major sports leagues in the U.S. like Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League in rolling out streaming services on mobile and connected devices. Like those sports, cricket has a rabid fan base; last year’s Indian Premier League streams on YouTube surpassed all expectations, with viewers watching more than 51 million streams during the 45-day tournament.

But unlike followers of the MLB, NBA and NHL, most cricket fans aren’t able to find the matches on cable TV. Willow.tv fills a void by providing high-definition streaming access to matches that viewers wouldn’t otherwise be able to find. And now, due to customer demand, Willow.tv has added video streaming on the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android mobile devices. It is also now available on Roku and Boxee set-top boxes, Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console and Google TV-powered devices from Sony and Logitech. The firm is also hoping to have its streams available on Samsung connected TVs and Blu-ray players before the ICC World Cup matches begin.

Vijay Srinivasan, CEO of Willow.tv, said in a phone interview that the company’s goal is to enable its viewers to watch cricket matches on the device of their choosing, whether it be a PC, a mobile device or especially a connected TV. “People are used to watching video on the TV, and we’re looking to bridge that gap,” he said.

To get on all these platforms, Willow.tv has an in-house development team that has been creating apps for various connected devices. For now, Willow.tv is devoted primarily to extending its own platform to different devices, although Srinivasan said the company has already been contacted by some third parties to use its back end and app expertise for their own live streams. While it has no plans to do so right now, Srinivasan said it could white label and outsourcing those services to other companies that do live streaming.

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All Cricket phone plans are pay as you go, with no contract required. For the budget-conscious, they are now offered with multiple data plans based on expected monthly usage on Leap’s 3G network. The new monthly plans are priced at $40, $50 and $60, which allow customers to consume 2.5 GB, 5 GB and 7.5 GB, respectively. Users exceeding the prepaid monthly data cap will not incur overage fees, but Cricket will throttle data speeds for consumption in excess of the plan cap. This new tiered pricing increases costs over Cricket’s previous data plan, which was 5 GB for $40. The model of throttling after a user exceeds her data plan is similar how T-Mobile handles overages.

Cricket is also offering unlimited data plans for Android and BlackBerry phone owners that are not capped in any way. Today it launched its first smartphone (the BlackBerry Curve 8530 which will cost $299), and it plans to launch an Android phone later this summer. The Android True Rate plan is $55 monthly, and the BlackBerry plan is $60. Like the tiered plans, these unlimited plans are contract-free.

The method of charging flat rates and throttling over-consumption is an alternative to the more common overage plans of AT&T and Verizon. The nation’s top two carriers charge hefty overage fees for data consumption that exceeds the allotted monthly data cap, and in June, AT&T said it would do away with unlimited data consumption on smartphones for new subscribers. Plans with overage fees generate uncertainty over how much the monthly bill may end up being for periods of heavy usage, and may make users leery of using certain services.

The explosive growth of smartphones has led to larger portions of the carrier’s networks being consumed by data, and both the tiered and capped plans (sub req’d) are attempts to derive value (sub req’d) from that high usage. The desire to recoup investment will only grow as carriers build out future 4G networks to handle the anticipated data requirements in the near future.

IPL chairman Lalit Modi called the massive undertaking a sports world first, claiming that no other league has ever made 3-D content available on such a wide scale. US sports leagues and broadcasters are for the most part still gearing up for test runs of 3-D technology. MSG showed a first hockey game in 3-D last week at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, but the IPL is already thinking in much bigger terms: Modi told the Eastern Times that his league is thinking about showing all 94 games of next year’s season in theaters.

The four-game test run is organized by digital film distributor Ufo Moviez, who has been showing 2D versions of the games at 650 theater screens across the country in recent weeks. Ufo Moviez specializes in the digital delivery of motion pictures for theater chains, and it calls itself the largest digital cinema network in India.

Related content on NewTeeVee: Where to Watch the Indian Premiere League Cricket Season Online

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Are We Putting the 3-D Cart Before the Horse? (subscription required)

So where do you turn to watch the Indian Premiere League Cricket Season? Not ESPN or Fox Sports. U.S. broadcasters tend to ignore the event, but cricket fans can turn to YouTube instead, where the complete season — with all of its 60 matches will be broadcast in real time almost all over the world. Missed a match? No worries, the IPL’s YouTube channel will also offer past games on demand.

The Indian Premiere League has only been around for three seasons, but it’s already been called “the world’s hottest sports league” by Forbes. The 2008 semifinals and final were watched by 62 million TV viewers in India, which comes to about 11 percent of the country’s cable audience. YouTube signed a deal with the league in January, which marks the first time the site was able to secure the online rights for a sports event of this scale.

YouTube will broadcast the Indian Premiere League games worldwide in real time, with one big exception: the U.S., where viewers won’t get to see the games 15 minutes after they’ve ended. That may be a concession to conflicting pay-TV rights, but it should actually help many of us to follow the league. Today’s game between the Deccan Chargers and the Kolkata Knight Riders started at 8 p.m. local time in Mumbai, which is 6.30 a.m. PST, and some games will get underway even earlier. Cricket fans can find the complete schedule for the season here.

Update: Subscription-based online sports site Willow.tv will stream the games in real time in the U.S., but cricket fans have to pay $60 to gain access to the live streams.

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Pocket, a regional flat-rate service provider that also operates a network in New England, claims 320,000 customers in South Texas while Leap’s Cricket provides prepaid service to about 400,000 users in the region and 5 million nationwide. The companies believe the move will result in additional contribution to Leap’s OIBDA (operating income before depreciation and amortization) in the range of $50-$60 million within two years.

Notably, the deal includes a provision that forces Pocket to sell its stake in the joint venture to Cricket should Leap change hands. That’s a scenario that’s increasingly likely given that Leap has hired advisers to explore a sale or merger in the face of an increasingly brutal prepaid market. A tie-up with MetroPCS  has been rumored recently, and the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Leap had reached out to both AT&T and Verizon Wireless. So like a lonely girl hoping someone will ask her to dance, Leap is doing everything it can to make itself a little prettier as the industry continues to move toward consolidation.

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Image courtesy Flickr user betsssssy.

Despite the worldwide popularity of cricket, the market for cricket applications on the iPhone is nowhere near the saturation point of some of the other popular sports. While this is most likely due to cricket’s limited appeal to the American market, there is still a fair amount of competition abroad — and some interesting innovations being put forward by iPhone developers.

As more and more people get their hands on these devices, cricket fans from around the world have a choice between nine applications, most of which can be downloaded for less than US$1 for both the iPhone and iPod touch.

Cricket (99 cents)

Now in version 1.2, when the application is loaded, the news screen displays a list of headlines from articles published on ESPN’s Cricinfo website. Clicking on a headline opens a new screen which shows a summary of the article and a link to open the full story on the Cricinfo’s website. The same news stories can be filtered on a per-country basis via the Countries screen, which arguably makes the default news screen redundant. The Live screen shows at-a-glace summaries of all current and some recent matches. Clicking through on an individual match opens the match details on the Cricinfo website — which is not easily viewable on the iPhone screen.

Overall, the application doesn’t provide much more than what a visit to the Cricinfo website would provide and may make some people wonder if paying for the application is justified, especially seeing that there are free applications that offer similar functionality.

Cricket Live (iCricket) (99 cents)
A relatively new cricket application for the iPhone (released in February 2009), it’s primary feature is a simple, yet functional news aggregator and viewer which pulls articles from several major news sources. The titles of stories, along with the first few lines of the text as well as the date and time, are listed on the main application screen. Clicking on a story launches a new screen with a summary and an ability to open the full story on the relevant website (similar to Cricket, reviewed above). The settings screen provides end users with some control over which news sources are polled.

While the application is elegant in its simplicity, the same functionality is also offered in other free cricket applications. Alternatively, spending a couple of dollars on a good quality, commercial RSS reader would provide the ability to keep up to date with more than just cricket news and provide additional control over the display of the news.

Cricket Live-007 (99 cents)

Another application recently developed (launched in February 2009), provides ICC rankings in addition to the live scores and news. Live scores and recent scores are both accessible via different main menu options, which can make it awkward to find details on a particular match if it finishes earlier than expected. However, a full scorecard for each match is provided within the application, which is commendable despite the tad-unpolished design. The ICC rankings section shows the current standings of teams and players in tabular format — however, no additional player or team statistics are available. Still yet, this is a nice addition that isn’t provided by other applications, but as with the scores section, the design is somewhat mediocre.

Overall, the application has a comprehensive set of features for the small price. Although it was developed by a company that develops a range of other iPhone applications, one would have thought that more effort would have gone into the interface design. Apple’s products in general are renowned for having intuitive user interfaces, however, this application contradicts that, resulting in a less than impressive interface that detracts from the usability.

Cricket Trivia (99 cents)

Released in April 2009, the Cricket Trivia quiz is a relatively simple application with a few added features to tailor it more towards today’s gamers. After launching the application, the user selects the number of random questions that will be included in the test. Each question is then answered, one by one with the final score presented at the end. Navigation through each question is a bit rigid, with the user unable to skip a question or go back to it. Upon the completion of each test, the score is then added to a table that allows you to keep track of your performance. While this provides an element of game play to the applications, there’s no ability to enter your name next to a score or to compare scores online, although both features are available in many similar games offered today.

This applications seems to be more suitable to an iPod than to iPhone since quitting the application (e.g. to answer a phone call) results in the quiz being interrupted. The application would benefit from a free-flow mode where the user is able to answer, skip or revisit questions as they are asked. There is also room for the interface design features to be improved. Unlike other trivia quizzes where answers remain relatively unchanged, the cricket statistics are in constant flux and one presumes that the app would need to be regularly updated to keep up with these changes.

CricketRSS (99 cents)

While its name is more accurate in regards to what to expect when you come across it, CricketRSS is functionally similar to the Cricket Live (iCricket) application reviewed above. The main screen shows a list of news headlines and truncated descriptions, conveniently grouped by date. Clicking on any one of the news items opens up the details page which shows the full description and the ability to open the full source website.

The features of the application are relatively basic and, apart from some minor design inconsistencies between different screens, is reasonably functional. Though not feature-rich, there are no flaws in the application, though for a dedicated news application, it would have been better if it had a wider range of news sources, apart from the usual suspects.

ECB Cricket (Free)

The official application of the English & Wales Cricket Board was released in time for the 2009 English summer. The application opens on the main scores screen and lists the current England international and English County Cricket (ECC) matches. Clicking on a match displays the score summary. Rotating the device horizontally displays the full scorecard for the match, with each innings on a separate screen — a novel approach which maximizes the amount of data that can be shown on a single screen. The interface of the main news screen is reminiscent of the album selection screens on iPods and displays headlines, photos and the truncated descriptions for each news item. Clicking on an item reveals the full article inside the application itself with the photo section working in a similar way. The ECBtv section is a list of video podcasts from YouTube streaming the external YouTube player.

The major, though understandable, limitation of the app is that it only shows the scores for the ECC and the England international matches. As such, the market is somewhat limited to the UK and international ECC fans only. The other notable absence is the running commentary for the matches or the ability to see the past match scores or team standings. Overall, the application is extremely well polished, even though some of the elements may appear a bit gimmicky at times.

iCricket (Free)

When this application was first released in October 2008, it started out as just a free RSS reader for Cricinfo’s news feeds. Since then it has grown to also include links to match scores. The main screen lists various categories of news and scores in a standard scrollable view, though there’s no grouping of sections, which often makes it confusing to determine where to go to access the information you’re after. This is particularly awkward in relation to the match scores and commentary — links to scorecards on the Cricinfo website appears in one section of the application while the running commentary (for selected matches only) appears in a completely different section. The news part of the application is relatively standard, broken down into per-country categories. Clicking on a category takes the user to the list of headlines with truncated descriptions. Clicking on the article opens the Cricinfo website for the full article, skipping the news detail page common to the other applications.

The application is functional, though it generally takes a lot of clicking around to find the information you want to access. The logic behind the layout of the sections leaves a lot to be desired. However, for a free app and an amateur fan effort, it is cute and a better effort than some of the commercial cricket applications reviewed.

MobiCast (Free)

This anticipated app was released in October 2008. The opening screen of the application lists the current, upcoming and recent matches. Clicking on a match displays Cricinfo’s famous ball-by-ball commentary and gives access to the full scorecard for the match. Clicking on a news item displays the full story on the iPhone itself, without opening the external website. The photos section shows photos that do not appear to be linked to any current matches nor do they behave like standard iPhone photos — they cannot be zoomed or scrolled through using the standard gestures. The podcast section is a useful bookmark of the podcasts by Cricinfo’s commentators.

There’s no question that the quality and the comprehensiveness of Cricinfo’s data is top rate, however the resulting application is both confusing and extremely frustrating to use. For example, throughout the match detail screens, notification icons for “4,” “6” etc popping constantly, regardless if matches being played or not. Even more confusingly, the “Matches” tab shows the same type of information as the main screen — only presented in a different format. One certainly expects more from professional developers backed by ESPN and it is hard not to dismiss this as a token effort in the also-ran category of the App Store.

Virtual Cricket ($1.99)

While the final application, Virtual Cricket, was only recently released, it’s clear that the developer has addressed the shortcomings that have been identified with the other applications. The matches screen displays a list of current, upcoming and recently completed matches, with single-line match status and the time of the last update. Clicking on a match shows the match summary with current score and the most recent commentary highlights (4s, 6s, wickets, etc). The news section follows the familiar pattern of listing headlines and truncated descriptions. Clicking through shows a summary of the news item, with a link to open the full article. The main difference here is that the headlines are aggregated from around 20 different news sources, grouped by source and country and catering to each user’s local preferences. The feeds also include leading cricket blogs as an alternative to the traditional news sources, as well as several video channels.

Clearly, this seems to be the most comprehensive application currently available. It takes many of the best features of every other application reviewed and presents these features in a professionally polished package. In a quest for features, it doesn’t forget the details and implements niceties.

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