Scores, streams & in-play
Rain over the Mahananda, a Friday in Siliguri, five of us round one phone. That is the FairPlay live sports board doing its actual job: every fixture running now, times in IST, and a feed light enough to survive the signal off Sevoke Road in a downpour. Below it, what a stream costs per hour against a daily pack, and why the flat upstairs hears a wicket before you see one.
On Now
In play now and about to start, priced on both sides. Every time printed here is IST.
Prices shown are illustrative
Mumbai v ChennaiLive
Min 100 · Max 2,00,000
Min 100 · Max 2,00,000
Meerut Mavericks v Noida Super Kings
Min 100 · Max 50,000
Min 100 · Max 1,00,000
Min 100 · Max 50,000
Jaipur Pink Panthers v Bengaluru BullsLive
Min 100 · Max 25,000
Min 100 · Max 25,000
Min 100 · Max 50,000
Know Before You Stream
Quality decides the whole thing. These are per-hour numbers, with how far each one stretches on a 1.5 GB daily pack.
| Mode | Per hour | On a 1.5 GB pack |
|---|---|---|
| Scores and odds only | ~14 MB | Over 100 hours |
| Low (360p) | ~315 MB | About 4.9 hours |
| Standard (480p) | ~495 MB | About 3.1 hours |
| HD (720p) | ~675 MB | About 2.3 hours |
| Full HD (1080p) | ~1,350 MB | About 68 minutes |
Full HD will not last one innings. A T20 innings is scheduled at roughly ninety minutes, and 1080p empties a 1.5 GB daily pack in about sixty-eight of them. Your pack is finished before the bowlers change ends for the last time. Drop the same pack to 360p and it gives you close to five hours; leave the video off entirely and the scores board would still be running well past a hundred.
The IST Day
Something is always on somewhere, though not all of it deserves a late night. Here is how the sporting day falls in Indian time.
Test sessions and BBL from across the Tasman, with A-League football beside them. You take this in over morning tea rather than at the cost of a night's sleep, which makes an Australian tour the gentlest overseas cricket a North Bengal household can follow properly.
Ranji and Duleep Trophy fixtures, with subcontinental internationals joining them at 1:30 PM or 2:00 PM. A quiet stretch of board, and light enough to keep open beside work.
The earliest Premier League and continental fixtures reach us in the late afternoon. For an Indian viewer this is the kindest football window of the week, and about the only one you do not pay for in sleep.
IPL at 7:30 PM, the ISL, Pro Kabaddi and the first half of the European evening. More fixtures land in this block than in the whole of the rest of the day.
Champions League nights, La Liga and the later Serie A games. Bear in mind that European clocks move twice a year while IST stays exactly where it is, so a kick-off you know by heart can shift an hour without warning.
NBA, MLS and South American football, at hours nobody in Siliguri keeps by choice. This is the slot where tiredness does the most quiet damage to a person's judgement.
Coverage
Live data sport by sport, plus the bits that let you follow two things at the same time.
The board moves with each delivery — runs off it, the over in progress, the partnership standing — while your video is still working through the previous one.
Goals, bookings, substitutions and shot counts as the ground logs them, with the clock taken from the official feed rather than from whatever your player has buffered.
Raid points, tackle points, do-or-die raids and the all-out count for both sides, right through every Pro Kabaddi tie.
Scoring by point, game and set, break points and tie-breaks included, from the four majors down through the ordinary tour weeks nobody televises.
Mark the fixtures you care about and the phone buzzes at the toss, at a wicket, at a goal — handy when a match begins while you are still stuck on Hill Cart Road.
Several fixtures sit on the board together, which is how a Saturday of football and a T20 get watched by the same person on the same screen.
Mumbai against Chennai, 7:30 PM, and the rain had been coming down over the Mahananda since about four o'clock. Five of us were in a second-floor flat off Sevoke Road with the balcony door shut against the noise of it, one phone propped up against a steel tumbler because the television in that house has never once worked through a monsoon. Hill Cart Road had thinned out to the autos that run in any weather. The power dipped once, came back, and the fan spent the rest of the evening turning slower than it should.
Say the board had Mumbai at 1.72 and Chennai at 2.14 when the first innings began, the way it does on a night like that, with the ISL fixture between Mumbai City and Bengaluru FC sitting a little further down and starting at the same hour. Football is no afterthought in this town. Kanchenjunga Stadium gets a crowd, and a fair number of the shirts you pass in Bidhan Market belong to clubs from Kolkata rather than to anybody local. What none of us had planned for was the row that started around the tenth over, when the flat above began yelling about a wicket our screen had not yet shown us.
Two separate things leave the ground and head for your handset, and they travel at very different speeds. Understanding that is the whole of it.
The score goes first. Somebody at the ground records the delivery, the feed pushes out a tiny text update, and it lands on your board in roughly a second. It weighs almost nothing. There is no picture to compress, no file to store, no re-encoding into five different quality levels along the way.
The picture takes the long road. Match video is not sent to you as one continuous signal; it is chopped into short files of about six seconds each, and your player downloads roughly three of those before it shows you a single frame, so that a dip in the tower signal does not freeze everything mid-shot. That buffer on its own puts you eighteen seconds behind the bowler's run-up. Then add the encoding, the hop across a delivery network, and the last stretch to whichever tower your phone has attached itself to. Twenty to forty-five seconds behind the ground is entirely normal, on every service, at every price.
So the flat upstairs was not on some superior connection. They had the cable feed running, and cable travels a shorter road than an internet stream does. That is the whole advantage, and it is worth maybe half a minute.
Once you have that straight, the shouting through the ceiling stops being annoying and becomes useful information. Halfway through the chase somebody in our room turned the video off and left the scores running, and from then on the board was landing wickets a beat before the noise from upstairs arrived. For cricket it is arguably a better read anyway. You get the over, the partnership and the run rate together on one screen, where a broadcast decides on your behalf which of the three you are allowed to look at in any given moment.
Following a match this way is not a poor substitute. It is how a lot of people here get through a full IPL weekend without destroying a pack, and it works on a phone in a pocket at a wedding as well as it does on a sofa. If you are acting on prices while a picture is running, though, the timing matters far more than it does when you are only watching, and those consequences are set out properly on in-play betting rather than here.
By the second innings that Friday, two phones in the room had run dry. That is the table above happening in real life. Full HD against a 1.5 GB daily pack buys you about 68 minutes, and a scheduled T20 innings runs to something like ninety. The pack goes before the bowling side changes ends for the final time, usually at the exact point the match becomes interesting.
The same pack at 360p stretches to nearly five hours. Scores only, at about 14 MB an hour, would keep going past a hundred. Change the setting before the toss instead of at the innings break, because most players remember the choice per device and you will forget you ever touched it.
There is a second thing the table cannot show you. A stream that stalls, recovers and stalls again is worse than no stream at all, since every recovery spends data on video you never actually watch. During the rains here, when heavy cloud thins out the signal, or on the road out towards Matigara, or standing on a platform at NJP waiting for something to arrive, switching the video off is not settling for less. It is the version that keeps working while the other one argues with the tower.
India sits beautifully for cricket and awkwardly for nearly everything else. An Australian Test starts while you are still having breakfast, which is why those tours get followed here far more closely than the numbers suggest they should be. European football fills the evening and then the small hours after it. The NBA wants you awake between 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM, which in a December in Siliguri means a blanket, a cold room and a decision you will regret at the tea stall in the morning.
The trap nobody warns you about is the clock change. Europe moves its clocks in late March and again in late October, and India never moves anything, so a kick-off you have known for years quietly slides an hour in one direction or the other. Nothing on the fixture list looks any different. Read the IST time printed against the match during those two weeks, particularly if you are the sort of person who sets an alarm from memory.
None of this is tied to Siliguri, or to West Bengal, or to any particular tower. The account is a single account, the wallet is a single wallet, and the fixture list follows the sport rather than your pincode. Whatever sits on the board in that flat off Sevoke Road sits on the board in Kolkata, Patna, Bengaluru or a homestay in the Dooars with one bar of signal and a view of tea gardens.
Your saved matches travel with you. So do your alerts, your stream quality setting and your betting history. A cousin who works in Guwahati opens the same board on the same evening and sees the same prices as the room in Siliguri does, which is the entire point of it being one account instead of a regional thing. Signing in on a borrowed handset is the ordinary FairPlay login you use at home: same number, same password, and the board comes back up with your fixtures already on it. FairPlay India covers the wider picture of how the site is used around the country, which is worth a read if you move between states for work.
The one genuine difference between two towns is the strength of what you are standing in. A thick 5G signal in a metro will hold a 720p stream through a whole innings. A hill road above Kurseong will not, and no setting fixes that. This is precisely where the score board earns its keep, because a text feed needs so little that it survives conditions in which video has no chance at all.
Scores and fixtures are open to anyone with the page loaded. You can follow the whole of an IPL evening, or a Pro Kabaddi tie, or a Ranji day, without an account existing anywhere. The prices standing beside those scores are the part that asks you to sign in.
Opening one is short work. A FairPlay register asks for a phone number, a one-time password and a few details, and it does not require you to fund anything the same day. Money is a separate decision and deserves to be treated as one. Plenty of people set up an account, watch three or four matches with the video off to see whether the board suits how they follow sport, and only think about a deposit a fortnight later.
If you do go further, the first useful habit is to keep the stakes small enough to be uninteresting while you learn how the board moves. The minimum on most of the markets listed above is ₹100, so the cost of working out what a lay price means, or how quickly a cricket market swings on one over, is genuinely small. What catches people is not the size of the first bet. It is the tenth one, placed at midnight, because the first nine felt fine.
The lag has a second career as a con, and it turns up every season in Siliguri the same way it turns up everywhere else. Because every ordinary stream is twenty to forty-five seconds behind the ground, somebody with a faster feed — or somebody actually sitting at the match — can tell you what has already happened and dress it up as a prediction. That is the entire mechanism behind the Telegram channels that message you mid-innings with a certainty nobody should have, and the WhatsApp groups that appear in your contacts each April.
The tells repeat themselves. They want payment in advance for tips. They send screenshots of winning slips, which anybody can produce in a minute. They offer a private low-latency stream that requires you to install a file they have forwarded to you. They ask for deposits to a personal UPI number instead of through the account itself. Some of them will ask for your password or an OTP so they can place a bet for you.
Treat all of it as the same answer. Install nothing that arrives by forward, from anybody, however convincing the group looks. Deposit only through your own account. Never read out an OTP, because no one who genuinely works for a betting site will ever have a reason to ask for one. And apply a little arithmetic to the offer: a person who could reliably tell you the next wicket would not be selling that to strangers at a monthly rate. They would be using it themselves and saying nothing to anyone.
A 2:00 AM start is where following sport and staying in charge of yourself quietly separate. Being tired does not announce itself the way being drunk does. You feel perfectly reasonable, your decisions get steadily worse anyway, and by the time a South American game is winding up at half past four the phone is doing most of the thinking for you.
Set your limits and reminders on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing is riding on anything, not at 3:00 AM with a chase going sideways. Responsible gaming lists what is available, and the FairPlay app will nudge you at an hour you choose rather than an hour you regret.
That Friday in Siliguri finished a little after eleven. The rain had stopped, Hill Cart Road smelled the way it always does afterwards, and somebody's father wandered in to ask why five grown men had spent a quarter of an hour arguing about a wicket that everyone had already seen. Half a minute of buffer, we told him. He was not impressed. He went back to the radio, which, to be fair to him, was ahead of all of us.
FAQ
Data packs, stream delay, IST timings and following a match with the video off.
Quality settles it. Scores and odds with the video off run at roughly 14 MB an hour, so a daily pack lasts past a hundred hours. Video is another order altogether: about 315 MB an hour at 360p, 675 MB at 720p and around 1,350 MB at 1080p. Set full HD against a 1.5 GB daily pack and you have about 68 minutes, which does not see out one scheduled T20 innings. Picking 360p on mobile data and saving HD for the Wi-Fi at home is the single change that buys you the most match time.
That gap is the design rather than a fault at your end. Video is cut into pieces of about six seconds, and your player quietly collects roughly three of them before it shows you anything, so eighteen seconds are gone before encoding, upload and delivery have even been counted. Twenty to forty-five seconds behind play is ordinary on any internet stream, the large OTT apps included. It is also why a flat two floors above you can celebrate a wicket that has not reached your screen.
Yes, and a good number of regular users prefer it that way. The board runs off the data feed, which reaches you faster than the picture and costs almost nothing from your pack. For cricket it is arguably the better read: the over, the partnership and the run rate sit together on one screen, where a broadcast puts them up only when the director decides you should see them.
The stretch between 7:00 PM and 11:30 PM carries the most, holding the IPL at 7:30 PM, the ISL, Pro Kabaddi and the bulk of European football. Australian cricket arrives during our morning, so those tours cost nothing in sleep at all. Anything from the Americas falls between 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM, which is worth weighing honestly before you give a working night to it.
They do, in late March and again in late October, and it catches people out every single year. Europe shifts its clocks and India leaves its own where they are, so a match you have always watched at 1:30 AM now turns up at 12:30 AM, or the reverse. The fixture list gives no hint of it, so read the IST time printed against the match instead of trusting an alarm you set last season.
That is exactly what it is built for. It is a light text feed rather than video, so it carries on ticking over a patchy 4G bar, in a lift lobby, or on the train down to NJP where a stream would stall and stay stalled. If the picture is rebuffering every few seconds, switch it off and read the board instead. You lose far less than you expect, and you stop burning your pack on frames you never see.
Several, and across different sports, which is the sane way to handle an evening with two football matches and a T20 all running at once. Video is the part that refuses to scale. Two streams doubles what leaves your pack and halves the attention you had left for either of them, so most people keep one picture and several score feeds.
They come off professional feeds entered at the ground, so they are quick and they are dependable, but the scorecard the governing body publishes afterwards remains the version of record. Every so often a decision is reviewed and a run or a wicket is adjusted later. That is ordinary in cricket, and it shows up as a small correction on the final card rather than as anything going wrong.
It does. One account, one wallet, one board, and the fixture list is decided by what is being played rather than by the town you happen to open it in. A week in Kolkata, Guwahati or Delhi changes nothing about your saved matches, your alerts or the stream quality you set months ago. The only thing that really shifts is the signal you are standing in, and the score board copes with a thin one far better than video ever will.
Scores and the fixture list are open to anybody with the page loaded, so you can follow a whole evening of cricket without an account at all. The prices sitting beside those scores are the part that needs you signed in. Registering asks for a phone number, a one-time password and a couple of details, and it does not oblige you to put money in the same day. Plenty of people open an account, watch a few matches with the video off, and decide about funding it later.
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