US sports broadcaster ESPN set a new landmark on Sunday by televising live cricket for the first time on one of its fully-distributed cable networks, ESPN2.
ESPN2, which reaches 96 million US households, broadcast Sri Lanka’s six-wicket victory over India in the final of the ICC World Twenty20 tournament, which was held in Mirpur, Bangladesh.
The Reuters news agency said the broadcast was part of an ESPN experiment to see if cricket can gain a foothold in the US market. ESPN placed the game on ESPN2 after learning that the 10 most highly viewed streams on its internet-only network ESPN3, were of cricket matches, regularly defeating college American football and basketball.
“We think cricket has the chance to get out to a broader audience and be on a bigger platform,” Russell Wolff, executive vice-president and managing director of ESPN International, said.
Wolff added that around 30 million people in the US identify themselves as cricket fans. He said: “You have a growing cricket interested population through straight population growth and through immigration patterns. You have a big and growing universe of people.”