Sky Sports is working with Moov on all of its England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) matches, and the live broadcast graphics provider is on the verge of completing the first year of the four year contract.

Moov began the core of its journey in cricket in 2024, working down under with Cricket Australia. Says Duncan Foot, CEO at Moov: “We’d done a few bits and bobs in cricket before, but our first proper cricket was last year with Cricket Australia. We thought it’d be easier to start in Australia and work our way backwards.

“We had a relationship with Gravity Media in Sydney to do all the domestic cricket in Australia. That was our first largescale project, and that was using data from Stats Perform to drive graphics in Australia. That was our starting point and helped us to develop a lot of our software.”

Moov worked with data from Stats Perform to give Cricket Australia’s operators a graphical interface to drive their graphics engines. Moov calls this software Orion.

Comments Foot: “Orion is our graphics interface software that we’ve developed. Orion was developed on cricket in Australia for that particular use, and then we further developed it for use in the UK with Sky Sports.”

Sky Sports journey

Towards the end of 2024, Sky Sports in the UK issued RFP for its cricket. Comments Foot: “That’s the first time Sky Sports has ever issued an RFP, the background being that they’d always used [a different provider] to do their cricket.

“So this was a departure for them, tendering it out for the first time. We entered that and had some very good feedback at the first stage, which was encouraging, and we got into the New Year and had to do a demonstration for Sky Sports as part of our pitch, in January. We won that pitch!”

Moov is now supplying all Sky Sports ECB cricket, which covers all domestic matches and any internationals that come into the UK to be played. That includes the recent Test series between England and India, on which Foot comments, “we had some really good feedback and it was a really good tournament”.

Most recently Moov has been working on The Hundred for Sky Sports. Lord’s Cricket Ground will host the final game of The Hundred on Sunday 31 August. The Hundred had a rebrand via Sky’s creative team for this season, which Moov implemented for the broadcaster.

Comments Foot on The Hundred: “We’re doing 68 matches in 27 days, which is quite a big undertaking in itself. That’s been quite challenging from a logistical point of view.”

BBC Sport and ECB extras

After Moov had signed the Sky Sports contract it found out there were a couple of extra tasks to add to the list of things to do, on top of the Sky Sports requirements. One was to provide in-venue graphics content for the big screens for the ECB on every game Sky Sports broadcasts. Another addition was to do a highlights package for BBC Sport for all Test matches.

Comments Foot: “There is a whole in-venue production team that the ECB provides, and we had to design some graphics and implement those through automation for their director-led production. We’ve given them a version of Orion that allows the director to call up their own graphics for the big screen, so that all the spectators [in the venue] can see the various stats and stuff.

“On top of that, a third part to this was that for all the Test matches, BBC Sport also do it as live and then create highlights from that, so we had to do a third instal at the Whisper Cymru Broadcast Centre in Cardiff for BBC Sport. We did a setup there in the BBC Sport brand, doing it in a simultaneous broadcast that Whisper, then we edit that down into a highlight show for each evening.

“On The Hundred, 16 of the matches are broadcast on BBC Sport at the same time [as on Sky Sports]. So on Tuesdays and Saturdays, there’s also a broadcast on the BBC, so we’ve had to support that on site; we have graphics operators on site for that one. We have a whole separate team doing exactly the same match, but with two more Viz engines on site.”

“So all of those things,” Foot says, referring to Sky Sports, BBC Sport, and the in-venue big screen production for the ECB, “we had to do at the same time.”

“From our point of view, we had a big undertaking anyway with Sky, but to then also do these other things all at the same time, with the same delivery date, was obviously quite challenging, but we delivered it. It’ll certainly be easier next year, put it that way!” laughs Foot.

On the challenges and workflow for all these requirements, Foot comments: “There’s a lot of stakeholders that we had to manage, and within that there’s a lot of data sources as well; we do the scoring, so our scorers are onsite at each venue doing the scoring, sat in the commentary box.

“That data does two things,” he adds. “Locally we create what’s called the fruit machine that’s being generated onsite for the commentators. Then there’s another fruit machine generated at Osterley for the production team to see. All that data is connected by and then going up into AWS system called Aquarius, which is managing it all. It’s also pulling in data from Hawk-Eye, with ball speeds. It’s pulling in data from CricViz, which includes their WinViz, Win Predictor metric. So all of that’s coming in and then being pulled down into the Sky campus at Osterley, and that’s where the graphics are done.”

In Osterley, Moov is driving three Viz engines for the onscreen graphics.

“We’re also doing a touchscreen for Sky,” adds Foot. “They have their Sky Cart that drives onto the pitch at the intervals, and that’s a big touchscreen, which drives a Chyron Prime engine. We’ve implemented that for them this year.”

Women behind the lens

As part of its agreement with Sky Sports, and something that Moov highlighted within its pitch to the broadcaster, was a push to increase the number of women working behind the lens within the sport.

Notes Foot: “Cricket is quite a historically male dominated sport. We wanted to work with Sky to try and improve that balance. For The Hundred in particular, over 50% of our scorers are female. We’ve done a lot of training over the last couple of months to better bring more people into that group, so that we can deliver on that.”

Foot says that while increased diversity and gender balance is a Sky Sports push, it is also an ambition shared by Moov. “It was something that aligned from the very start of our pitch around diversity, which they picked up on and asked what sort of commitments we could put in there,” he notes. “We said during the four year cycle, we wanted to try and get parity within particular parts of the production. So on the scoring side, we’ve achieved that in the first year, so that’s really good. But we’ve got more to do, particularly around graphics operators; we want to increase that further, but we’ve delivered that in the scoring element of it.”

As part of that bid to increase diversity behind the lens, and tying into Sky Sports sustainability requirements, Moov has also pushed to get some of the roles it requires – such as scorers and graphics operators – regionalised rather than working on site or out of Sky Sports’ campus in London.

Foot comments: “So in the past our productions have been based centrally in London, but by having the scoring onsite, it gave us an opportunity to regionalise some of that facility. So some of our scorers are based in Leeds, Manchester, Gloucestershire, the West Midlands, so we’ve been able to diversify from that perspective. From that point of view, we’ve managed to tick two boxes in quite a short amount of time, and now we need to build on that. Going into next year, we want to continue to push on that.”

Looking ahead

After The Hundred, Moov is working on three international T20s and three One-Day Internationals (ODIs) between England and South Africa, followed by the finals of the T20 Blast, the domestic T20 competition, and the final of the domestic One-Day Cup, all of which take place in September. The English cricket season then begins again in April 2026.

On what Moov is already thinking about implementing for next year, Foot says: “Generally the core stuff is good. We’ve developed that over the season and we’ll probably look at some efficiencies for next year. But the key stuff for us is what more can we do with data? So visualising the information that’s there, giving commentators more information than they’re currently getting, and putting stuff on screen. Particularly the partnership with CricViz, we’ve already been doing some stuff this year, but it’s being able to put that into a graphical form for next year. So there’ll be a lot of work we’ll do over the winter, working with CricViz to come up with new graphics for next year.”