The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Monday revealed the viewership details of the 2019 World Cup, including some stunning numbers from the India-Pakistan match. (More Cricket News)
The tournament was the most-watched ICC event ever, with a global cumulative average audience of 1.6 billion for live coverage, a 38% increase over the 2015 edition and a unique broadcast audience of 706 million viewers, demonstrating the phenomenal reach and power of live cricket around the world.
Contributing heavily in that spike was India and its millions of cricket lovers. As expected, India vs Pakistan clash became the biggest match of the tournament. And it converted into numbers, which fetched 273 million unique TV viewers and another 50 million digital-only viewers.
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India vs New Zealand semi-final match recorded a world record for the highest ever concurrent viewership of a live stream with 25.3 million viewers.
ICC Chief Executive Manu Sawhney said: “These quite astounding numbers demonstrate the power of live cricket to connect and engage more deeply with diverse audiences around the world. The theatre and drama of live cricket is compelling and the added jeopardy of tournament cricket enables our sport to cut through and aggregate audiences like never before even in our increasingly fragmented world.”
Emphasising cricket’s continued appeal, the 706 million unique audiences was a 22% increase compared to that of Cricket World Cup 2015. 41% of the audience were women, whilst 32% of the 706 million were aged 18 to 34 years old.
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Fans watched the Cricket World Cup for a longer amount of time than ever before, with the event amassing a record 13.7 billion global viewing hours. This is a record for an ICC event seeing an 18% increase from the 2011 Cricket World Cup and 72% increase from the 2015 event.
This was the most widely available ICC event in history as more than 20,000 hours of live-action, repeats and highlights coverage was carried by 25 broadcast partners across more than 200 territories.
Aarti Dabas, ICC Head of Media Rights, Broadcast and Digital said: “More people are watching, more hours of cricket on different platforms than ever before. The consumption of live matches on digital platforms is evidence of fans watching live sport differently and wanting to be fully immersed in the sport and this is an exciting time for cricket.”
Hosts England won their maiden World Cup, defeating New Zealand in a thriller at Lord's.
