England vs South Africa: Opening World Cup match seen by record 114 mn

The opening match of the ICC Cricket World Cup (CWC) 2019 between home team England and South Africa recorded a reach of 114 million viewers on the Star network, making it the highest opening world cup game. Reach is the number of people who watched the match for at least one minute during its telecast.

Star India said the reach of the opening world cup game is 2.2 times of the opening game of the most recently played ICC tournament — the ICC Champions Trophy 2017, between England and Bangladesh. The viewership for the ICC CWC 2019 opening match is 101 million impressions. Impressions is the unit of viewership measurement that tells the number of people who tuned in to the match at any given point of its telecast.

The ten-team tournament being played in a single-round robin format from May 30 to July 14 is broadcast across various channels on the Star India network, and on Hotstar, the broadcaster’s video streaming platform. Commenting on the opening numbers, a Star Sports spokesperson said, “We are thrilled with the record opening numbers and believe that the early numbers will only get bigger with the India games that follow.”

The broadcast of the ICC CWC 2019 began with the warm-up matches and is available in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla and Malayalam (opening and all India match days), apart from Select Dugout. 

The network has a slate of non-live programming planned for the duration of the world cup, which it hopes will sustain the excitement over the rather long world cup season.