CRICKET ON TV

The Broadcaster's Audience Research Board (BARB) publishes weekly reports on TV viewing in the UK.  These provide details of the audience for cricket on Sky .  This post looks at cricket viewing figures for 2019 and 2020 taken from https://www.barb.co.uk/viewing-data/four-screen-dashboard/.

Results are for weeks commencing 29 April 2019 to 26 September 2020, and, if I have understood correctly, viewing figures are for all the viewers who watched a particular programme.  (So if person A watches a test match from start to lunch, B from lunch to tea and C from tea to end that's 3 viewers although only 1 person was watching at any point in time.)  I have combined figures for Sky's Sports, Cricket and Main Event Channels. 

Some Context  

Matches in the IPL have viewing figures of around 100m.  The 2019 Men's Cricket World Cup final had a  unique UK audience of 15m (8m maximum audience at any point).  Once behind Sky's pay wall viewing goes down sharply, an EPL football game in the prime Sunday afternoon slot gets about 1.6m viewers.

Cricket in 2019 & 2020.

Viewing figures for cricket on Sky lag behind EPL viewing. Sport's audiences in the UK are generally determined by the day of the week with Sunday afternoon getting the best viewing figures (The any given Sunday trend is less pronounced in 2020.)  Typically cricket on Sky on a Sunday has an audience of 600,000 - 800,000.  Just to pick out a few examples, India vs Pakistan in the group stages of the world cup finals, 792,300, England vs Australia 1st Ashes test, 658,752, England vs South Africa T20 February 2020 743,698 and England v West Indies 3rd test 2020 879,038.  Viewing figures on other days are lower, particularly for test matches which, on weekdays, have viewing figures of more like 400,000.

So you could say cricket gets an audience about the half the size of the premier league.  But that's not an exact comparison, Sky shows two football games on a Sunday which have separate ratings, it might be better to combine those ratings for a like for like audience share.  Given the less watched Sky Sunday football game gets about 500,000 viewers, cricket gets something like a third of football's audience.  But cricket seems to match up pretty well with any sport on Sky other than football.  A well watched grand prix gets about 500,000 viewers and the Open golf roughly the same.

As well as giving absolute viewing figures the BARB data gives us a few glimpses of who is watching cricket on Sky and what formats, (i.e. test ODI, T20 international, IPL) they are following. 

The South Asian Audience

The viewing figures for the 2019 World Cup give an indication of the size of the British cricket watching audience with a South Asian heritage.  Looking at an audience of almost 800,000 for the India vs Pakistan match compared with just 411,600 for England vs South Africa the week before gives an impression the British cricket audience is basically South Asian heritage.  

But look at the figures in more detail and a different picture appears.  The India vs Pakistan match was a Sunday fixture whereas England vs South Africa was on a Thursday.  A more like for like comparison came with group games, England v South Africa and India v Bangladesh played on Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd July. In this head to head match up the England match won, with 618,077 viewers compared to 347,229 for the India v Bangladesh fixture.  Of course there would be England cricket supporters watching India v Bangladesh and British cricket fans who support India and Bangladesh watching the England v New Zealand game, but I think there's a suggestion of a British Asian audience of around 400,000/ 500,000 compared to an England supporting audience of 700,000  - 800,000.

What the figures don't tell us is does Sky get the South Asian audience to subscribe when there aren't Indian / Pakistan / Bangladesh games to follow?  There's an indication that they don't in the audience of 1,125,012 for the England vs India World Cup group fixture.  Next to the World Cup final (which was free to air) this was the biggest audience for any game in the period covered which implies Sky had the benefit of combining two, generally distinct, audiences. (there was one other 1m + audience which we'll get to in a bit.).  

Domestic vs International Cricket

This is a bit of a mis - match.  The IPL may be the dominant force in world cricket but in the British market it isn't big potatoes.  The best audience I could find was 241,652 for the week commencing 26 September 2020.  The one caveat is that the IPL has been on BT Sport for the last two years and viewing figures on Sky might increase as the tournament reaches its final stages.

The best audience for a domestic English 20/20 in 2020 is 223,200. Going back to 2019, the Blast did rather better, with the Lancs v Yorkshire game attracting 379,183 viewers and the final 455,400.  The final audience is for the one game rather than finals day as a whole and so underestimates the audience in comparison with a day long Test or ODI match.

If we take 2019 as being a more typical year for the Blast than 2020 the Blast isn't doing badly and I wonder whether we need The Hundred, which will just be the same players with different team names, kit and another set of rules.  But there was one piece of evidence in The Hundred's favour, an audience of 192,500 for The Hundred draft.  That's a better audience than quite a lot of Blast and IPL matches manage.  The draft was on a Sunday, but still perhaps a sign the Hundred's innovations might grow the audience for domestic English cricket.  

One other interesting snippet.  Warwickshire had a 160,000 people stream this years 20/20 fixture against Worcestershire.  But only 8% of the viewers were in the UK, I guess this means 128,000 people watching in India and Pakistan, which sounds like a business opportunity to me.

 Tests v T20 V ODI

So, given international cricket is dominant in terms of ratings which format gets the highest viewing figures?  As I said above, perhaps the most marked factor is viewing figures seem pretty stable across formats.  Of course there's no way of telling from the free BARB figures whether that's because there are 2 (or 3) separate cricket audiences, which just happen to be roughly the same size or because most cricket fans are fairly catholic in their taste and will watch whatever cricket is available.  I suspect it's the latter.  

Given the constancy there is some evidence that there is a rough order of popularity going (from top to bottom), T20, ODI, Tests.  Evidence for this is the natural experiment of England's tour of South Africa having three consecutive Sundays, showing a Test then an ODI and finally a T20. The viewing figures for the three were, Test 362,644, ODI, 669,252 and T20, 743,698, implying Tests are a lot less popular than short form cricket. But I wouldn't want to make too much of this. Tests can, on occasions, get good viewing figures, one of three games with an audience over 1m in the period for this post, was the third test between England and Pakistan, played this summer and watched, on one day, by 1,076,145 Sky subscribers.   Similarly peak day viewing of last summer's Ashes topped out just short of 900,000, pretty much the same as the 935,661 which was the maximum audience for the England v Australia T20 series of 2020.

 Women's Cricket

Not a huge amount to say, the BARB figures only show the top 15 programmes in any 7 days, and women's cricket rarely makes the cut.  When it does the figures aren't bad, 299,000 watched one game in the World Cup T20, more people than watched any IPL or domestic T20 game on Sky in 2020 (in the period covered).

I wonder if women's cricket particularly suffers behind Sky's pay wall.  It may be latent sexism but I'm rarely interested in a women's game and it wouldn't surprise me if there are lots of other male, middle aged  (stretching a point in my case)  Sky subscribers with similar views.  And whenever you see Mark Butcher doing the presenting you know Sky have it marked down as a second XI fixture.  I think an independent deal for women's cricket  might work well.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Good question.  As usual with this sort of exercise I end up thinking "my conclusion is: I'd want more evidence before reaching a conclusion."  But I think there's enough here to determine; international cricket drives Sky's viewing figures.  Domestic cricket, even Indian domestic cricket doesn't challenge its preeminence.  That may change if The Hundred is a big success and you can see the appeal to Sky of an audience of London, Birmingham, Cardiff and Manchester watchers rather than England , Pakistan, India and Bangladesh watchers.  Managing that conversion is a big task, but perhaps viewing figures for The Hundred draft is ground for "optimism".

Within international cricket, men's cricket beats women's cricket, which is, arguably, not given enough prominence on Sky.  There's some limited evidence short form cricket is more popular than Tests (I do find the South Africa figures quoted above quite convincing) but definitive conclusions aren't possible and if short format cricket does get more viewers than Tests it doesn't seem to get that many more viewers.  People do still watch Test cricket, both at the grounds and on TV.