UC Browser, a flagship product with 30 per cent market share in Bangladesh — according to StatCounter — from UCWeb, a business within Alibaba Mobile Business Group, has joined hands with Twitter and Microsoft Bing to provide a mobile gateway to all things cricket ahead of the all-exciting cricket season through the debut of a revamped UC Cricket, which is part of a broader plan to ride on the digital content trend and shape how content will be consumed on mobile internet, says a press release.

The Revamped UC Cricket

UC Browser, Twitter and Bing have a huge user base in the country. The partnership aims to reshape the digital cricket content landscape. According to the partnership, Twitter will provide live, public, and conversational content related to cricket matches on UC Cricket such as trending Tweets of cricketers, and exclusive Twitter-only content from official cricket team accounts such as native videos, Periscopes, Vines, and photos. Moving forward, UC Browser and Twitter are exploring deeper integrations around the cricket season to make the UC Browser experience always-on throughout this exciting cricket season. Bing, a leading search engine of Microsoft, will provide predictions to upcoming games via Bing Predicts.

Besides, UC Browser brought a brand new UC Cricket for Bangladeshi users in the end of February 2016. This new version of UC Cricket is specially designed for Bangladeshi users with new interface and local cricket content, such as live scores, headlines of most popular matches in Bangladesh and cricket guessing games.

With the booming development of mobile internet, Bangladesh will witness a significant increase in different formats of media being consumed online such as video, photos, live streaming, social interaction, and so on. With such landmark partnerships in the industry, UCWeb aims to address the key challenge faced by users and partners i.e. content discovery and navigation for users and content distribution by publishers and partners.

Commenting on the content strategy, Kenny Ye, managing director of UCWeb International Business Department said: ‘As a mobile browsing tool, a content aggregation and distribution platform, UC Browser now provides news, cricket content, movies, video and music for Bangladeshi users. Our cooperation with Twitter and Bing is going to reshape the digital cricket content landscape, considering the modalities of our cooperation and scale of our combined user base. This partnership is going to offer the right mix of content for all cricket lovers ahead of the upcoming cricket season. In the future, we hope to bring more convenience in Bangladeshi people’s daily life by making it possible to do shopping, train status inquiry, mobile recharge, ticket bookings and much more on UC Browser.’

Ravichandran Bhaskaran, head of business development, South Asia for Twitter said: ‘Twitter is your connection to live culture, so the perfect place to keep up with all the latest from the cricket games, and share your excitement with other fans. Last year, this saw the IND vs PAK World Cup match generated close to 1.7 million Tweets in a single day. The partnership with UCWeb will extend the best Tweets from the most exciting moments of every match by fans, players, and commentators to a larger and new cricket-loving audience throughout the season.’

Sundar Srinivasan, GM of Bing Search commented: ‘We are excited to be a part of this unique collaboration with UC Browser that aims to make the user’s cricket experience more exciting and seamless. Bing will provide consumers data and stats on cricket games. Cricket lovers can also follow Bing Predicts to find out which team is likely to win a particular match. Last year, 83% of the predictions made by Bing Predicts for the world cup matches were accurate, and with the integration with UC Browser, we are excited that many more users will enjoy this unique analytical feature on Bing.’