MUMBAI: The Indian women's cricket team may have failed to lift the T20 world cup at Melbourne, but definitely have turned the eyeballs of the audience, by putting up a tough fight during all the league matches.
In the first 12 knock-out matches, Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India reports: “Out of the 2548 million viewing minutes, Indian women’s matches dominated the television screen with a staggering 72 per cent to 1842 million viewing minutes.”
According to BARC India, “The ongoing ICC Women’s T20 world cup garnered a total of 2548 million viewing minutes for the first 12 league matches played between 21-28 February. Of which 61 per cent of the male audience watched these matches.”
“The 12 matches played during the tournament, achieved a cumulative reach of 46 million viewers, of which 27 million viewers were in the male category and 19 million were in the female,” reports BARC.
For the first time in history, the International Cricket Council had organised the women’s T20 world cup as a standalone event unlike last season in 2016. The last edition of women’s T20 world cup was bundled with the men’s T20 world cup, which is scheduled later this year in October.
According to the ICC, the first 12 matches of T20 world cup saw a growth of 213 per cent and attracted 2.46 billion viewing minutes in India versus 787 million viewing minutes for the same matches in the previous event in the same format.
ICC also said that the opening match between India and Australia saw a reach of 20 million and an average audience of 3.55 million, which is 39 per cent higher than the most-watched match in the previous edition. Star Sports is the official global broadcast partner of ICC. In India, all the matches were shown in five languages: English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu.
Similarly, across ICC’s digital and social media platforms, fans have engaged in greater numbers than ever before with an unprecedented 701 million video views to date compared to previous best in 2017 for the women’s ODI cricket world cup, which netted a total of 100 million views from the whole event.
