Melbourne: The International Cricket Council (ICC) Saturday released TV and digital viewing figures for the Women’s T20 World Cup group stage, setting new TV and digital records and becoming the most-watched women’s cricket event ever.
Across ICC’s digital and social platforms, fans have engaged in greater numbers than ever before with an unprecedented 701 million video views to date. This is a record for ICC women’s events with the previous best coming in 2017 for the Women’s Cricket World Cup, which netted a total of 100 million views from the whole event.
Meanwhile, the official tournament social channels have attracted 34 million engagements and over 2 billion impressions with fans.
Group stage TV viewing figures: The event has been shown in almost 160 territories across the world through live and highlights television coverage. Whilst the live digital coverage — simulcasts on mobile and other digital platforms like Hotstar in India and other parts of the world and channel apps such as Kayo in the host nation have been available globally — in over 200 territories.
Continuing the TV viewership records, Australia’s opening game against India became the second most-watched women’s match in Australia with a combined average audience of 448,000 across Fox Sports and the Nine Network.
Whilst in India, where Star Sports are broadcasting India matches in five languages: English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, the same game saw a reach of 20 million and average audience of 3.55 million which is 39 per cent higher than the most-watched match at the Women’s World T20 2018 edition.
The first 12 matches of this event have attracted 2.46 billion viewing minutes in India across the first 12 matches versus 787 million viewing minutes for the same matches in the 2018 event. This represents a 213 per cent increase.
The event is receiving unprecedented free to air coverage in Australia with 13 matches (versus six in 2018) broadcast on Nine Network. This has contributed to a 1,600 per cent increase in viewing minutes of the tournament in Australia.
The most-watched match in the UK was England vs West Indies with an average audience of 245,000. This became the second most-watched match for any international women’s match on record in the UK. The only higher audience was for the Women’s World Cup 2017 final between England and India which saw 460,000.
(IANS)
