Host broadcaster Sky Sports has leant into its use of graphics for the 2025 season for England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) cricket, to give both old and new fans all the information they need on screen to enhance the viewing experience.
Sky Sports has to be able to educate and enlighten fans about Test match cricket, including those who have joined the cricketing wave from watching The Hundred, and also the hardcore cricketing fans, all in one go. Graphics – including augmented reality (AR), which is run on Hawk-Eye kit from a Spidercam at the grounds – within the broadcast, are enabling it to do that.
Speaking to SVG Europe, Liz Thorne, Sky Sports’ senior production manager in the cricket team, explains: “We’re coming into the Lord’s Test, which is our showcase test, it’s the glamour test. We are making really good use of all these new contracts that we’ve signed with our third-party suppliers. So we have an awful lot of people on site providing an awful lot of technology to us. We try to absolutely utilise everything to the best of its ability, but ultimately [the goal is] to tell that story to our customers, to be able to demonstrate what I know people see as a very complicated sport.
“The more ways that we have to tell that story, the more ways that we can satisfy both our diehard test match fans who are sat in the pavilion at Lords, and also all those amazing new young fans that are coming in through The Hundred – the young women, the young men that have been really enthused by what we’ve done over the last five years – [the better],” she continues.
“We like to use the technology to tell the story and we might do some really in-depth analysis in our lab, which is our big screen that we have inside the studio at the grounds; we might do a really in-depth piece of batting analysis there from Nasser [Hussain, English cricket commentator and former player], but we would always try and hit that mark somewhere between our viewers that know what we’re talking about, but also we need to explain it to new viewers all the way through, showing what’s the state of the game, what is this partnership between these two amazing Indian batters, and putting that on a big AR jumbotron-style graphic in the sky [on screen], which is run remotely from the gallery at Sky to try and enhance the coverage.”
Graphical teamwork
Moov’s fruit machine, Hawk-Eye’s AR graphics, Quidich Innovation Labs’ HyperView, which provides an advanced visual representation of live fielding positions in a virtual 3D stadium environment, and more all go towards breaking down or ramping up the informative experience of a test match.
Says Thorne: “We could show ball by ball how that ball is moved within the AR space using Hawk-Eye technology, which is attached to our spidercam. We’ve got Quidich on site who do pitch maps for us that show us exactly where the fielders are in each place on the field, and in between balls when they’re moving from one side to the other because the batsman has changed from right to left-handed; you can actually see those fielders move across the screen. Quidich create this amazing view that’s from the inside of the batter’s helmet that will give you a bird’s eye view of when that batter is getting ready to receive the ball, where the fielders are around the pitch.
“Everything is to enhance our coverage, to tell that story to our viewers, and we’re making the most of it in this next test coming up.”
As the home of cricket in the UK & Ireland, Sky Sports will provide fans with unmissable action in 2025 including England Home International Cricket, The Hundred, Vitality Blast and County Championship cricket
