The Challenge
Major League Cricket has built an international audience in a short space of time. The competition is broadcast by takers across several territories, and each one expects the feed delivered their way: their formats, their commercial breaks, their compliance requirements.
The brief was to serve all of them properly from a single source. One clean feed leaving the ground, arriving ready to air wherever it landed, whether that was a domestic network or a platform on the other side of the world.
The Constraints
- Multiple takers, multiple requirements — every taker had its own formats, protocols and delivery expectations; versioning the feed separately for each of them would have multiplied both cost and risk.
- Ad inventory sold territory by territory — each taker sells its own commercial inventory, so a single shared ad break was never the answer.
- Accessibility handled once, not many times — captioning is an obligation for US broadcast; adding it separately at every destination would have meant paying for the same job over and over.
- Connectivity to the schedule — live sport does not wait for circuits to be provisioned. Capacity and redundancy had to be specified and in place ahead of the season.
The Solution
Consultancy came first. We designed the workflow end to end and specified the connectivity the broadcast would require, then procured the circuits so that capacity and redundancy were secured well ahead of the first ball.
Our transmission kits went in on site. Feeds left the ground over resilient multi-path IP with redundancy built in, monitored by our engineers for the duration of every match.
The customisation layer is where a single feed became useful to every taker at once. Closed captions were inserted as the feed passed through, meeting accessibility obligations upstream rather than at each destination. SCTE markers were placed to mark break points to frame, so every taker could trigger their own ad inserts against their own inventory, all from one common source, with nobody re-versioning anything.
Distribution then delivered that source to each taker in the format they required, across US and international markets simultaneously.
The Result
Major League Cricket reached audiences in the United States and internationally from a single, clean source: captioned, ad-marked and delivered in each taker’s required format, without anyone having to rebuild the feed at their end.
The whole chain, from consultancy and connectivity through transmission, customisation and distribution, was run by one team. That removes the gaps between suppliers where responsibility tends to get lost, and it means one point of contact when something needs answering mid-match.
It is also a model that travels. Any competition serving several territories at once can be handled the same way: build the versioning into the feed as it leaves, and every market receives exactly what it needs without duplicated cost downstream.