As Australia celebrated beating England in the final of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup earlier this month, it was already clear that the tournament had broken new ground for the women’s game. Ticket sales and viewing figures broke records, while the final at Lord’s on 5 July was the highest-grossing women’s cricket match, generating more than £1m in ticket sales. For the ICC, which is investing heavily in the development of the sport and in the broadcast offering to reach fans across the globe, this is all part of the plan.
“With women’s cricket it’s a continuous expansion of what we do. The idea for the ICC has been to bring women’s cricket coverage as close to men’s cricket coverage as possible, and it’s reached a place where it’s side by side now,” explains Ajesh Ramachandran, executive producer of ICC’s live productions.
“We continue to invest in women’s cricket and the broadcast production is one part of that,” confirms Anurag Dahiya, CCO, ICC. “The ICC’s overall move has been towards equalising our investments in both men’s and women’s events, whether that’s prize monies or how we schedule them, or the kind of venues we go to, or the in-venue production, all of that.”
This programme of continuous investment led to a number of firsts at this year’s tournament, which was held in England from 12 June to 5 July.
Most notably, for the first time the T20 World Cup was produced in full 1080p HD, something that reflects the continued growth, scale and ambition of the women’s game, according to the ICC.
Ramachandran adds: “This time we had our first ever native 1080p production in a women’s event, so that if broadcasters want to, they can upgrade to 4K very easily. [Indian broadcaster] JioStar has an audience that wants to watch all the top cricket across various formats. So we have a 1080p production as well as the more conventional 1080i, which the majority of broadcasters around the world have the capability of exploiting. This was a big move for us. We recently introduced it for the Men’s T20 World Cup a few months ago in India and Sri Lanka, and with the appetite of having similar specs for the women’s events, we introduced it here as well. That premium service is something that we continue to move towards in the future as well, and even in terms of all our feature production and the content around the live offering, we continue to deliver it to our licensees’ requirements. The idea is for it to be accessible to everyone, so in as many formats as possible.”
The tournament also had the highest quality camera production of any Women’s World Cup, with a minimum of 35 cameras at each of the six host venues.
“We had at least 35 cameras, but some venues had more,” says Ramachandran. “For instance, at Lord’s, where we had a few games, including the final, we had a couple of cameras dedicated to the Long Room as the players walk in and walk out. It’s a sensational build-up shot, as it is a follow-through shot once a big player is dismissed. We also experimented a little bit with some games. We put in HawkVision and some games we worked with a company called Arcturus, which did 360-degree replays for some players and so there was a bit of extra overlay in a couple of the venues. We’ve been increasing specs event by event, and this was the most for any women’s event. Even for our standard senior men’s event, you look at 35 as the number that you hit where everything we need covered from a premium coverage sense is taken care of.”
The 360 replays became a key part of the tournament, helping with both technical analysis and attracting a younger audience.
He continues: “We went big on 360-degree replays, which we want to introduce as a signature of ICC broadcasts. It helps with a lot of technical analysis, but also more than that for younger people watching we want to respect the difference in demographics. We are a broadcaster that needs to appeal to not just all geographies, but to all age groups as well. It’s something new, and when done well and for the right play, it looks quite spectacular. We’ve got a lot of value out of it for outfield catches and great pieces of fielding, especially in the outfield, because that sweep around of the cameras really works well.
“Quidich played a key role in helping us deliver these sequences throughout the tournament, and together we achieved some very encouraging results. As this isn’t something that a lot of broadcasters do, we’re trying find out what the best practices are and keep employing them so we keep getting better at it. I think this was the first event where we actually managed to use it as a consistent signature.”
The replays also helped the ICC to meet another major objective – to showcase the on-field talent.
“This was something that we went forward with at full tilt because we wanted to show off the skill and athleticism of the athletes, and we wanted that coverage to have quite a bit of this,” explains Ramachandran. “Cricket is a strong replay sport because you get so much dead time between deliveries, which means we can get a lot of tech into the actual live game. We take advantage of that, and it helps with a lot of the storytelling as well for senior women’s events, especially. We do a lot to raise the profile of the players and make them well known, so any sort of tech that shows off their skills is something that’s very valuable.”
The ICC’s long-term relationship with Quidich also helped.
“We’ve worked with Quidich for a long time. We introduced their player tracking system to the world in the World Test Championship Final in the UK in 2021, and that’s the first time we had commissioned them to do it, and they delivered. So we have had a strong partnership with them over the years, and they delivered the strongest 360 solution for us.”
Other partners include NEP and Sunset+Vine. “Delivering a production of this scale also depended on two outstanding partners. Our production services partner, Sunset+Vine, played a pivotal role in assembling and managing specialist crews across every venue. Alongside them, our equipment partner, NEP, provided the technical backbone of the tournament, supplying the outside broadcast facilities, engineering expertise and core broadcast infrastructure that enabled us to deliver a consistently high-quality production throughout the competition. Together, they were also instrumental in helping us raise the benchmark for the broadcast of women’s cricket.”
Ramachandran is, however, quick to point out that while investment and tech specs are increasingly on a par between the men’s and women’s games, there is still a difference in the way the stories of the tournaments are told.
“Women’s cricket is slightly different from men’s cricket so we don’t use exactly the same storytelling methods. Here we look to raise the profile of the players, make them household names. That is one objective. So there’s a lot more storytelling about the player, and there’s also an emphasis on having subject experts, so it’s usually a female-led commentary panel, because you want to get the right voices that understand the sport and its nuances the best. That is the only way to provide meaningful commentary for a sport that is subtly different, and that is what we’ve tried to do. It’s been our constant endeavour and it worked very well for us in this event as well.”
The innovations and investments certainly seem to have paid off with Sky announcing that the 2026 World Cup was the most watched iteration of the tournament on record with 15 million viewer hours recorded. Dahiya expects other broadcasters to announce similarly impressive results.
“Some of the early numbers have been fabulous. Right in the beginning of the event, we saw in India, for example, uplifts of upwards of 150% over the previous tournament. Sky, of course, reported that the England games were about 70% higher than in the previous event, so certainly from a viewership and reach perspective it’s done phenomenally well, especially given that we were going up against the FIFA World Cup.”
As would be expected, the ICC is keen to build on the momentum of such a successful tournament, and plans are already in place.
“That’s been the playbook with every event that we we’ve covered in the last few years, and that means providing better marketing support for events before they go in, better pre-event programming, which we supply to our licensees as a build-up, better support for digital content, and that’s content created by our teams, but also in collaboration with content creators that have now become a big part of these efforts from a production perspective,” he says. “We keep on challenging Ajesh and his team to come up with something even better, and they deliver every time, so I’m pretty sure that trend will continue. Ultimately the largest number of people are touched by our sport through television and through broadcast, so I think that’s where we will continue to try and innovate and keep getting better coverage for our core fans, but also introduce elements for the significant growth demographics, both geographically as well as in terms of age groups or device usage. That’s something that we will continue to try and expand.”
