Facebook Will Have the Exclusive Rights to Broadcast ICC Cricket Matches

• Facebook wins a contract with ICC to stream Cricket games in India until 2023.
• The social media giant is looking to grab more user data through engagement.
• Cricket teams will win more exposure, recognition, followership, and merchandise sales.

Facebook has reached an agreement with the International Cricket Council (ICC), buying the exclusive digital content rights to stream ICC events until 2023. The deal concerns the Indian market, where the game of Cricket is very popular. No further details about the deal have surfaced, so we don’t know how much money Facebook had to pay for the exclusive rights to reach out to the vast audience in India. The social media giant will then take the post-match recaps and broadcast them to the rest of the world.

According to the VP and Managing Director of Facebook in India, Ajit Mohan, they are planning to leverage all three of their applications to cover Cricket events in a new and unprecedented way. So, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp will all be involved in this new project somehow, engaging users in multiple ways. Existing fans will have a new channel of consumption, while a new generation of fans will be cultivated thanks to the reach that these superior technology platforms can have. In overall, Facebook is looking for ways to engage its users and gather more data about what they like, and then push targeted ads based on this.

The Cricket teams are looking to get new fans and new followers, liven their online community and take advantage of events to promote their brand name. Selling merchandise, tickets, jerseys, and getting mentions all over the place is not a bad thing to enjoy either. Facebook tried that again in 2017, but their bid lost marginally to that of “Star India”. In 2018, they acquired the streaming rights to broadcast La Liga games in India, and now it was time for the big haul. The most recent ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup amassed a total of 4.6 billion digital video views online, so you can get the idea for the size of this market.

In January, we covered a similar story about Twitter announcing an exclusive deal with the NBA and Turner Sports. This deal would allow Twitter to broadcast live NBA action through a special camera feed that would follow a single player. That player would be decided by user votes on the platform, engaging interaction, boosting posting rates, and finding a new way to combine social media with sports. This latest Facebook deal with the ICC sounds a lot like a page from the same book, so we expect to see more of this in the near future.

Are you excited about Facebook covering ICC matches, or do you not care about Cricket? Let us know in the comments down below, or on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.