Record viewing figures for County Cricket as live streams cross 30 Million
The live streams of men’s County Cricket racked up all-time record figure during the 2024 summer, with over 30 million views across the eighteen First-Class Counties.
The Vitality County Championship clash between Somerset and Surrey drawing the highest viewing figures for red ball cricket, with over 600,000 views across the four days and 250,000 people tuning in to watch the final day of the fixture.
Vitality Blast matches regularly achieve combined audiences of over 200,000, with tens of thousands of viewers tuning in to watch the big hitting competition. Every game not televised by Sky Sports is live on county YouTube channels.
Surrey’s Metro Bank One Day Cup clash with Gloucestershire was the Club’s most viewed Live Broadcast, with over 243,000 viewers. Our dramatic tie with the Glosters was the second most viewed (220,000 viewers),with 18,000 viewers tuning in to watch the dramatic final over of the match.
Counties have been running their in-house production of non-televised fixtures since 2017 and the quality of production has increased significantly in recent years, with counties offering multi-camera broadcasts with some of the great voices of county cricket commentating. Broadcasters familiar to millions through their regular work on Sky Sports, BBC Test Match Special, Talksport and numerous popular cricketing podcasts including the Wisden Podcast, The Final Word and Tailenders bring games to fans every week.
The YouTube broadcasts combine with the incredibly popular audio ball by ball commentary still provided on the BBC Sport website, BBC Five Live Sports Extra and BBC Local Radio to give cricket fans the best quality live coverage of English domestic cricket in the 134 year history of the County Championship.
The high quality and competitive cricket draws viewers from all over the world with around 28% of viewers from the UK but many fans tuning in from India, Bangladesh, Australia, Pakistan and the USA.
