The Challenge
International cricket draws a truly global audience, but reaching fans in their own language has traditionally meant flying commentators to every corner of the globe and absorbing the considerable costs that come with it. For tournaments of the scale and pace of the ICC T20 World Cups, that model is costly, complex, and increasingly hard to justify.
The brief for the Men’s tournament was clear: deliver broadcast-quality alternate language commentary in Urdu, Mandarin, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesian — simultaneously, reliably, and without putting a single commentator on a plane. For the Women’s tournament, the same approach was pointed at a different set of markets: Japanese, Thai, Indonesian and Mandarin.
The Constraints
- The Cost of Getting There — flights, accommodation, per diems and equipment freight add up fast across a multi-match tournament, often the reason feeds for emerging language markets never get made at all.
- Technical Reliability Across Multiple Feeds — four simultaneous language feeds demand infrastructure that cannot fail; any weak point hits the broadcast directly.
- Timing and Synchronisation — without low-latency video, commentators call action they can’t quite see, and the audience notices immediately.
- A Different Market Mix Each Time — the Women’s tournament targeted a different combination of languages to the Men’s, so the workflow had to flex without being rebuilt from scratch.
“This has been the most accessible T20 world cup ever for the ICC and you have played a very significant part in helping us achieve that.”
— ICC
The Solution
We deployed our remote commentary kit to talent across the world — commentators in each language set up in their own location, with no studio required. Once the kit was powered on, our engineering team took over remotely. Each commentator connected to dual monitors: a dirty TX feed with full programme output, graphics and scores, and a clean feed for reading the play. Low-latency video kept every caller locked to the action in near real-time, wherever they were.
Connectivity was built for resilience — each kit supported multiple simultaneous IP connections for path redundancy, with high-powered 5G antennas for automatic failover. Audio followed a dual-cloud path, streaming simultaneously to two separate cloud environments across all four feeds. Distribution was handled in real time: we took the ICC international world feed, remixed the audio with each language track, and distributed all four feeds globally in parallel.
Because the workflow lives in the cloud rather than fixed infrastructure, moving from the Men’s tournament to the Women’s meant changing the language line-up and the talent, not the system. Urdu gave way to Thai; everything behind it stayed the same.
The Result
Urdu, Mandarin, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesian audiences received broadcast-quality commentary throughout the Men’s T20 World Cup, and Japanese, Thai, Indonesian and Mandarin audiences the same throughout the Women’s — eight language feeds in total, delivered entirely remotely and managed end-to-end by the Adapt Media Services engineering team.
Running the model across two tournaments proved it was never a one-off. As rights holders look to reach wider, more diverse audiences without the overhead of traditional production, the blueprint is already proven — and flexible enough to point at whichever markets matter most next time.