I would wager a considerable amount that you wouldn't. Nowhere near. A Sunday afternoon T20 domestic game getting 2 million on terrestrial ? Sorry no.

If cycling can get 3 million plus a properly marketed t20 block of cricket has HUGE potential. Not from day one but it WILL convert people to the game. Amazed people refuse to see this.

What cycling did ? The Tour De Yorkshire got 368,000 viewers on the Sunday. Quite a way off 3 million and if you are referring to the Tour De France then, as others have said, you are making unrealistic comparisons. The Tour De France is considerably bigger than Derbyshire v Sussex and always will be.

I think you are being totally blinkered with this, rose tinted spectacles and not an open mind. Your DS name suggests that.

Having Domestic cricket on FTA won't increase the tv rating by a huge margin especially if it is on itv 4, if anything the ratings will be similar to what it would be on Sky.
but it is needed to get more people down to their local cricket county so they can make more money from domestic cricket.

Darren, do you know what figures Challenge Cup games get on the BBC? It's probably the best domestic comparison I think of as to what domestic T20 cricket might get

I have just looked on BARB at BBC2’s top 30 shows of that week ( the cup games were 7th and 8th ) and neither are in the top 30 so that means they got less than 900,000

Cheers, reckon that's where you'd be looking at a regular average figure

Are people seriously thinking a level of cricket at big bash quality with genuine world stars of cricket won't win over new fans? T20 isn't aimed at the current fans but to get new ones in. It will be wildly popular! Not overnight and not every week but a good game will go 'viral' and you'd see huge numbers.

For a ashes win you get about 1 million watching on sky and slightly more watching on channel 5 highlights plus i believe tms hovers around 1 million too. There is already a large cricket fanbase out there but T20 done correctly will explode the game in the uk. It's so frustrating that people cannot grasp how much of a game changer it would be!

T20 on free TV will only really take off if on BBC2. Neither ITV or C4 will put on ITV(1) or C4 instead it would be relegated to ITV4 or More4. And despite what others may think that rapidly shrinks the audience as many people never even look what those channels have on. It will never be on the main channels as the audience will be tiny compared to the soaps they usually have on and are their biggest advertising bankers of the week.

I know franchise cricket isn't popular but London (Surrey) vs Manchester (Lancashire) may get a reasonable audience, but Sussex vs Northants won't. You also need Gale, Warner in the teams not a county jobber or cheap SA kolpak player.

Would though the ECB force Sky to make some free as with BT Showcase and Champions League plus that will have one big bash game per week / round from this winter. If still with Sky how they use a Freeview channel they have and nor the new Sports Mix channel as this is still pay and only for their entertainment customers.

So the rating is kind of similar to what it would be in Sky then.

I am not sure the peak rating for the biggest road racing event at the moment when a British rider won it for the first time in over a century of it being run is quite the same as the latest meeting between Somerset and Derbyshire for two points on a league table.

That year the Tour de France had recored ratings on ITV4. Averaging almost 320,000 viewers.

But if you ware saying that a T20 competition on an FTA channel will be regularly watched by fewer than half a million people, but may get a few million for the final that is a little pessimistic.

As I said, international events rate differently to domestic sport. People watch events in huge numbers, fans watch sport in considerably smaller ones.

When the Great Britain women's curling team were massively popular at the 2002 Olympic Games the BBC followed it up by showing more curling. Hardly anyone watched. People did not stay up after midnight to watch the sport of curling, they stayed up to watch the event and British success in it.

It happens in all sports. The first Briton to win the Tour de France or England trying to win only their second ICC event are completely irrelevant to the ratings potential of a domestic T20 competition. You can draw baffling dichotomies all you want, but it is a well documented and proven fact.

The first time a Premier League match was shown free-to-air in the UK on Freeview was an ESPN free weekend. I cannot remember the match they had but it was not especially exciting, something like Stoke vs West Ham. But it saw pretty much no increase in the rating whilst something like seven million watched a Six Nations match on the BBC.

Whilst they were not the most popular of teams, it was still the biggest sporting league in this country by far. It was the first time the Premier League was shown free to ordinary households without any sort of pay TV (previous free weekends still required cable or Sky). It was after decades of people complaining about having to pay to watch the Premier League. But no one did apart from the fans, it was watched by something like 800,000 viewers.

The best way to promote cricket on free-to-air TV is with ICC tournaments, because people will watch their national teams in international events simply because they are national teams and events. They will not watch random places competing in arbitrary leagues. And even franchise leagues of super stars are still representing random places in a random league.

The WT20 would be perfect for such networks, given suitable time zones. But the way the rights are sold by the ICC to maximize profit makes this unlikely. The amount a pay-TV broadcaster would offer Star Sports for exclusivity means a free-to-air one would have to buy the whole package, including U19 World Cups, rather than just the single event.

More people will watch cricket of any sort on a free-to-air network than they would if the same were on a pay one. That is simple mathematics. And some of whom, with no pay TV access, may well have never seen live cricket before and can be turned into new fans But not in any sort of "huge" numbers.

And not because of anything wrong with cricket or its popularity as a sport. But because most people in this country do not watch sport on a regular basis. They do in Australia. They do not in the UK.

No I think it is you not realising that it won't be as big as you want it to be. Surely the ECB and 99% of posters in this thread are not wrong.

Our posts are based on facts, yours are based on assumptions, that is the big difference. You keep comparing to Internationals too so even your own posts are contradicting the theory. We are NOT talking England V Australia we are talking Derbyshire V Kent. Or Leeds V Bristol if you want to base it on franchise.

I will admit now, I will not watch it. Wouldn't interest me. Don't watch the IPL or Big Bash but love my cricket

I think the point is, though, that cricket has stopped being an 'event' sport, in the way that Wimbledon is every year. Yes, there are still many cricket fans - some have Sky, others listen on TMS and catch up with the Channel 5 highlights, others catch-up online. But for the casual sports fan, it is less likely for them to be caught up in it. I know that 2005 was a once-in-a-lifetime event, don't get me wrong, but that was an example of the country getting caught up with cricket as 'event TV'.

We saw a taste of it when Broad ripped through the Aussies last summer - BBC website impressions boomed and C5 highlights got record figures. But imagine (in a parallel universe) that the innings was being shown live on the BBC. You'd have had people streaming it on the website from work, people tuning in in their droves to see this unbelievable drama. Now, I know that there's no chance of BBC getting test cricket back. But the point is a broader one - people who want to watch/follow cricket have their ways to do so. But we are losing a bit of public penetration to those who aren't into cricket.

And the question for the ECB is how best to manage that. Now, they'll have to balance out the loss of income from Sky (verses what a terrestrial broadcaster would offer) against the increased visibility to the public. I'm not saying that domestic T20 would get blockbuster figures, but it would penetrate the consciousness more than Sky do, especially if it's BBC and they back it up with their website coverage.

I'd actually like to see international T20 go to a terrestrial broadcaster. It's, what, two matches a season, ideal for a terrestrial broadcaster to pick up in terms of timeslot and has the international value. I think it would do quite well, ratings-wise. Again, the ECB have to balance the lost income from Sky verses the increased exposure. But previously, the ECB have been able to just sign on the dotted line with Sky, receive their money and give away all the rights. I think it's getting to the point where that now won't quite wash with the counties or the public and they will have to make these decisions in a more thoughtful manner.

Even back in 2003 and 2004 (ignore 2005 as an outlier) the best viewing figures for England's internationals on Channel 4 (according to BARB) were only 1.5 million.

The problem with FTA (20/20) county cricket in England is the likes of me. I'll watch Lancashire in anything, FTA, pay TV or live at the ground; as would many other Lanky fans, but put Worcester v Glamorgan on any channel and the interest from me isn't there - especially if Lancs are playing at the same time. Might drop in if it's a close finish or something, but wouldn't watch the whole game.

Finals day - yeah, that's different, would (probably) watch that without Lancs on FTA but wouldn't sub to Sky especially.

One possible, but very, very unlikely option would be for ITV1 up here to show Yorks/Lancs on a Friday night with Corrie on in the middle - would the rest of the country have a film or something or watch the game??....and then it rains a bit so Corrie is delayed etc etc > or BBC 2 possibly doing a similar thing, using games as a local opt-out.

Think we will end up with Surrey/Middx and the Roses game ending up on some FTA channel, with one of the QF's and the Final itself FTA. TV wise, ITV4 would tick most of the boxes for the coverage.

But wouldn't it have been interesting to see what the figures would have been like in 2006? If cricket was still FTA the year after that Ashes win, it would have been fascinating to see if people still came back for more.

People still stuck in the wrong mindset. If all the world starts ( minus the Indians) and a sprinkling of 'true domestic' players are in the sides the quality will be very strong and neutral fans will want to see the likes of Gayle and Warner no matter who they play for. If t20 can get millions watching on sky then a 'lower tier' can get millions on free to air. If a final of snooker or darts can get millions no reason T20 cannot do the same. Not to mention the free to air aspect of it bringing in kids to the game.

IF it happens it'll transform the scene in the uk and restore cricket to talking points of the summer schedule

Suspect this debate will roll on and on here and off here though!!!

The fact is no one knows Gayles/Warner or any of the big international players in the street.
The only reason T20 world cup rated well was because England were in the final and playing great cricket.

Sure. But C4 were actually quite unlucky that the period in which they had the rights (ignoring 2005 and also putting 2000 to one side) was a period in which England were gaining in competitiveness but weren't really lighting up the world yet. 2005 demonstrated that with a winning team playing exciting cricket there was a greater casual demand. Sure, it wouldn't have carried on getting 8 million viewers, but (especially given the success England has enjoyed on home soil since 2009) it would only have increased.

I've said this before, so I won't bang on about it again, but C4 was doing amazing work to try to get cricket into public consciousness in their early years - 2000-2. The events in parks, beach cricket on Clapham Common, film screenings and DJ sets in the evenings after showing the match during the day. The only year in which the cricket on-screen matched up with the vibrancy of this was 2000. Why, when the ECB had a consistently winning team full of 'characters' (I'm referring to the Andrew Strauss-led team of 2009-2012) did they not try to make cricket vibrant once more by putting those kind of events (even if live TV coverage remained behind a pay-wall). I'll tell you, because they didn't mind appealing to the same old white, middle-class people who are affluent enough to go to matches and pay for Sky subscriptions. That's fine, if they want to do that, but you won't grow the game that way.

Plenty of talk about how great figures were in 2005 etc for the Ashes, but were what were viewing figures like in the early 2000s for domestic games, that's the true comparison you need to be making. Just because a Franchise system would have some international players doesn't mean it will automatically get international cricket ratings

Who has said it won't win over new fans? We just don't think it will get the atmospherically high viewing ratings that you seem to, the frustrating thing for all of us is how you can't grasp that.

An Ashes win is one of the peak moments of the sport, you're not going to replicate that every T20 game, and not whilst the other half also wants to watch Emmerdale/Coronation Street or people want to watch the Friday night Premier League games of the new broadcast deal

If you just believe hard enough, unicorns are real.

Think it's all hearsay - We never really know what goes on do we.
From chatting to a few people it seems, Ten offered the money. Fox were prepared to go a bit higher but CA went with the FTA option.

The difference between broadcasting cricket (and most sports) in Oz & the UK is vast.
Australia have a commitment to FTA sport which we simply do not. We see it as premium stock.
Cricket never disappeared from mainstream Australian TV - and now with the one day cup back on public service TV there is no cricket on Fox. Fox aren't even taking the Eng V Sl series.

I hope the ECB can get this model into their heads and begin to use it, if no cricket appears on FTA soon, it will continue to wither and eventually become a niche sport

The test match summer kicks off tomorrow. 2 series against mid ranking teams. I think the attendances may shock a few viewers.
Hopefully it's the jolt the ECB need before tender begins next year

That and the fact that Sky is one of the best Marketing machines in the world. I'd bet that quite a few people who watched that final wouldn't have even been aware that the tournament was starting 3 weeks earlier but Sky plug their coverage so often and so well and that their general sports fans subbers become interested.

It's something that often gets forgotten about during the FTA debates, but Sky market/cross market their sports so well and they gain interest in that way. Take boxing for example, over the past 2 years Sky have really dug into football fan bases to plug their boxing and have gained large crowds, awareness and PPV buys from it. So much so that their PPV fights have far more national awareness than FTA world title fights like the one this weekend on Channel 5. The arena for that was empty and even on boxing forums people had forgotten/ weren't aware that it was on.

Just because something is available to more people doesn't mean that they are aware / interested.


This this this. People need to stop quoting large audiences for huge FTA events and start with more relevant stats.

What did say the 2004 C&G semi final rate on channel 4?

Stop quoting things like a World Championship Snooker Final, what does a random Saturday session of the snooker "shoot-out" rate on ITV4?

I'd doubt the answer to both of the above will be anything other than "not a lot".

Sky deal with cricket coverage excellently, I'm mostly a vision on whilst listening to the radio commentary. It reminds me of being out on a summers day in the car with my parents.
T20 blast would get a reasonable audience on bbc2. The schedule is empty ( full of repeats) however I don't think they would get more than Sky. I'm sure people like me who like sport have stumped (?) up for Sky, if we can.
I can remember when test matches were on terrestrial ( I liked cricket then but preferred tennis ( I was a child !). The BBC were in a mess when a test match was on the same time as Wimbledon! Bouncing from BBC 1 to BBC 2! At least Sky can give dedicated channels!