COUNTY CRICKET'S SAVIOUR

YouTube, now 20 years old, has helped county cricket regain a lost audience, but the game is still not maximising the value of the technology

YouTube is 20 today. The first-ever YouTube video, Me at The Zoo, was uploaded on 23rd April 2005 by Jared Karim, one of the platform’s founders. It has of course had a huge bearing on the world, with now in the region of 2.6 million new videos uploaded daily, leading to YouTube becoming the world’s second most popular search engine (after Google which shares the same parent – Alphabet.)

It has had an equally powerful influence on cricket. Notably English cricket. Especially recently. Because, as you may well recall, 2005 was also the final year of terrestrial coverage of the game in England. After that, courtesy of the then ECB chairman Giles Clarke, it was all manacled behind the Sky paywall. Where it still largely remains. The audience for Test matches, which peaked at over 9 million on Channel 4 during that iconic 2005 Ashes series, dropped off a cliff. An England Test match is lucky if it gets over 1 million simultaneous viewers today.

That is not Sky’s fault. They do a fantastic job covering the game and have invested hundreds of millions in it. The ECB would now tacitly admit however, that hiding all professional cricket behind a paywall was almost as foolhardy as the eleven, yes ELEVEN, literary agents who rejected JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscripts. They totally underestimated the traditional cricket fan’s belief that the game is a national treasure that no one should exclusively ‘own’ and who would therefore boycott the idea of having to pay a subscription (other than the TV license fee) to watch it. They overestimated a sport not now widely played in schools being able to cope with its sudden loss of visibility. They have been playing catch-up ever since.

YouTube has been a sort of saviour. Prompted by the pandemic, counties began uploading the live match footage from their static analyst cameras onto websites and YouTube. It’s a service that has slowly begun to sooth that latent cricket audience outraged that their game had been ‘stolen’ from them. (It also diminished the number of disgruntled batters returning to the pavilion declaring ‘that umpire needs a white stick’ when the evidence of a plumb lbw is just being replayed on the dressing room feed.)

The viewing numbers are quite startling. Lancashire, who invested significantly in their coverage, notched up over 3 million views for their matches in 2023, and reported well over 4 million views last season. Somerset reckoned their top of the table clash with Surrey last September registered close to 1 million views over the four days. (It is worth emphasising a ‘view’ is when someone watches a video for at least 30 seconds. One person could clock up several ‘views’ if they dip in and out of a live stream. It is not the same as ‘unique viewers’ which is invariably a significantly lower number, and according to the people in the know, ‘number of hours consumed’ is a more valuable metric.)

For the exciting climax of the Durham/Warwickshire match a week ago, there were apparently around 10,000 people watching the livestream simultaneously. It shows there is a market there. It might just be that a few of those hard-to-reach Gen Z viewers (ages 16-34) are being enticed. As the table above illustrates, YouTube is their channel of choice even before Netflix, and ahead of all those traditional channels. Even on a TV screen, not just on their smartphone. The data showed they even watched one of my YouTube videos.

But…. these county streams are not being effectively monetised. We are not talking subscriptions here. That would be fatal, undermining all the good progress so far (as Kent discovered last year when they charged for their Vitality Blast live stream.) Sponsorship, virtual advertising and viewer data collection are far more viable. It still astonishes me that counties are putting out their live coverage all day with acres of real or virtual advertising unused (see below.)

Hampshire's ad-free stream (L) how it might look (M) and virtual ads in New Zealand

There is another side-effect to all this coverage. Classic moments are captured (certainly if they are close to the wicket – ie in the field of vision of the fixed wicket-to-wicket cameras.) But so are controversial ones, such as Jonny Bairstow given out caught off his arm a week ago (below left), and Jamie Porter’s match-winning caught and bowled on Monday. But, as we discuss on the latest Analyst podcast, they pose more questions than they solve. The images from these cameras are usually not sharp enough to offer conclusive evidence. Therefore the arguments will continue.

There is a solution. The six-camera remote operated system we trialled at Hampshire last summer provides broadcast-quality images at 125 frames a second – offering super slo-mos that can adjudicate all but the most contentious low catches. Thirty seconds after Mark Stoneman (then of Middlesex) had stormed off in high dudgeon after being given out gloving Liam Dawson, our system proved that the ball had hit his arm not his hand. The decision could have been overturned.

Our four simultaneous angles showed that Stoneman was struck on the arm not the glove.

There are match referees at every county match (former professional players or umpires), watching the game with the live stream close at hand. If the standard of the coverage was affordably enhanced (eminently possible with our remote-operated system) a simple form of DRS could be employed in county cricket. There is even HawkEye available too, via the cameras on the umpires’ breast pockets (provided they’ve remembered to charge the batteries.)

Not only would this system produce much sharper pictures, offer better entertainment and solve many controversies, but it would also give county pros early experience of DRS before they enter the international arena, and therefore a potential performance advantage. It will improve the standard of umpiring (as it has at international level, with one or two exceptions.) It might even prevent those match referees from nodding off. What’s not to like?

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