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Geoffrey Hampson didn't know what to expect when he arrived in the conference room of the Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel in London last February. He and a colleague had flown in to meet India's cricket czar, Lalit Modi, the 45-year-old scion of a billionaire family who'd recently spearheaded the founding of a professional league — a kind of NHL or NBA of cricket.

Mr. Hampson, chief executive officer of Live Current Media, a Vancouver-based website developer, had an hour to persuade Mr. Modi that he should sell the Web rights to the Indian Premier League (IPL) to Mr. Hampson's 30-person firm rather than to one of the global media giants that Mr. Modi had short-listed for bids.

Mr. Hampson had one major ace: His company owned the domain cricket.com, which it intended to develop into a global portal. He and his staff had picked it as the next URL likely to develop into a "destination hub," meaning an e-commerce portal with the potential to draw a large, passionate audience.

Cricket.com had seemed like a no-brainer. With an estimated 1.2 billion fans, cricket is the world's second most popular sport. And in India, its largest market, it is undergoing a transformation. Traditional cricket matches last from one to five days — not a format conducive to TV coverage. But a new version of the sport, dubbed Twenty20, was making its way to the subcontinent: Its matches last less than three hours, giving the audience a more fast-paced, urgent experience that is closer to North American pro sports.

"[Cricket.com] got us in the door," Mr. Hampson says. But snaring the contract — worth $50-million over 10 years — would mean betting Live Current's entire market capitalization (the company trades over the counter) on a nascent league in a sport Mr. Hampson didn't know much about. "This was enormous for the company," he admits. "There was risk, no question. But people told us there are only a handful of things Indians are really passionate about: religion, Bollywood and cricket."

Live Current did have experience in squeezing money from domain names. The company owns a portfolio of more than 900 Web destinations, including such "beachfront" addresses as leisure.com and stereos.com; its perfume.com site raked in $9-million last year in advertising and product sales.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had also seen an opportunity last year, when it launched a professional league comprising eight teams. With the help of sports-marketing behemoth IMG, BCCI auctioned off the global broadcast rights for $1.1-billion (U.S.). Another auction for the franchises raised $780-million from seven Indian businessmen and Bollywood stars, and one foreigner: Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son. Adding official sponsorships from the likes of Honda and Pepsi brought the league's haul to more than $2-billion.

All this investment was aimed at tapping the growing spending power of the Indian consumer. The country's population is also very tech-savvy — but, as yet, neither the IPL nor BCCI had an official website. Mr. Hampson figured that his company and the two Indian organizations could have a symbiotic relationship: The features that Live Current developed for IPLT20.com and BCCI.com would seed content on Live Current's cricket.com portal, while that global gateway would in turn drive visitors to the two new proprietary sites.

An executive at Live Current knew someone at BCCI, who in turn introduced Mr. Hampson to Mr. Modi, the commissioner of the IPL. Mr. Modi was keen to have cricket cultivate some of the revenue-generating brand power of the major North American and European leagues, and saw a highly interactive website as an important tool. He especially liked Live Current's emphasis on fan involvement, with official photos, live scoreboards and ticket sales augmented by fan polls, fantasy cricket, ball-by-ball blogs, even multiplayer games. He told Mr. Hampson that the other bidders' proposals offered much less fan interactivity.

Moreover, he saw the company's small size as a plus, figuring the project would take top priority at Live Current in a way it wouldn't at a larger outfit.

"The IPL is very young, hip, a new concept, and they wanted to have that translated into their web space," Mr. Hampson says.

The discussion in London ran to three hours. Live Current insisted that it needed rights to run the BCCI website as well, to mitigate the risk involved with a startup league. Since BCCI oversees all things cricket, its site would draw fans around any major international games.

After some negotiation, they struck a deal: BCCI and the IPL would receive $5-million (Canadian) each year from Live Current, whether or not there was any revenue. The next $5-million of revenue would go to Live Current. Anything above that would be split equally. Any proceeds from cricket.com were entirely Live Current's to keep.

The meeting ended with Mr. Modi asking his visitors to exit the room so he could conduct a conference call with the league's board to firm up the handshake agreement. "This was 7 p.m. in the U.K., the middle of the night in India," Mr. Hampson recalls. "He simply told his assistant to wake up all the board members. This is a guy who doesn't waste any time."

The board's immediate approval worked like a starter's pistol going off, because the Live Current team had only six weeks before the IPL's opening game. The company teamed up with Netlinkblue, a Web developer based in the United Arab Emirates that had the video-streaming rights to the IPL games, and the two firms set up a joint venture, Global Cricket Ventures, based in Mumbai. "The execution side has been a challenge for us," Mr. Hampson admits, "because Netlinkblue is based in Dubai, the client and developers are in India and we're in Vancouver. Three geographies is a tough task."

They've managed it so far. The IPLT20.com site launched in April, outdrawing ESPN.com on cellphones the following month and generating more than 50 million page views during the first season. The BCCI site was up in late September. Once cricket.com goes live before year-end, the company expects a steady stream of advertising and e-commerce revenues to support what will essentially be a stand-alone business. Mr. Hampson still knows little about the sport of cricket, but he knows this: "As a business, it's pretty much recession-proof, and there isn't much competition."

• Connect with Geoffrey Hampson

  Mr. Hampson will take your questions at 1 p.m. ET. Click here  to submit your question.

• Expert insight

  "Sports do well in economic downturns. Anything that's a diversion to the population from the troubles at hand usually does fairly well," says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation. He offer his take on Live Current's big investment and what other entrepreneurs can learn from it. Click here for more.

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