
The Hundred: Sky Sports and the ECB turn to gamification as cricket is freshened up for a new audience By Will Strauss, Editor
Monday, July 19, 2021 - 11:16
Print This Story
Player avatars for presenter analysis and a new way of displaying on-screen broadcast graphics will both be part of Sky Sports' gamified live coverage of the new family friendly' cricket tournament The Hundred which starts on Wednesday (21 July).
The Hundred is a professional franchise 100-ball-per-innings format involving eight men's and eight women's teams located in major cities across England and Wales.
With the sport looking to attract new fans, it's not cricket for dummies' but it is very much a TV-friendly format, with accessible start and end times and shorter matches, that has been devised to be more entertainment-focused and inclusive than other forms of the sport.
As such, alongside some of the world's best cricketers, The Hundred will feature a mixture of music, DJs, fan participation and more in an effort to attract more female and child viewers, attendees and participants.
Sky Sports is the host broadcaster for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)-owned competition and will show all 68 games with the BBC broadcasting 10 matches free-to-air, doing its own coverage but taking Sky's world feed.
It's been a challenge but when is innovation not a challenge? We've gone into the unknown we do believe it is a broadcast world first
The family-friendly approach will be reflected in Sky Sports' output which, in conjunction with the ECB, will use gamification to appeal to younger viewers.
That gamification comes in two main forms: player avatars that will be used for analysis during presentation elements of Sky's coverage; and on-screen broadcast graphics with a gaming' or esports' feel that have been designed to help simplify the game for viewers.
Sky Sports director of cricket Bryan Henderson, speaking to SVG Europe ahead of the tournament, explained the premise behind the tournament and what they are setting out to achieve.
Cricket as a sport is doing really well and has had some incredible moments over the last few years, with both the England women's and men's World Cup wins and some amazing international and domestic cricket, he said.
The issue though, concerns demographics. Cricket's audience on and off-screen is typically, quite middle-aged ABC1 men. And although they are an important segment, we need to engage new fans if we are going to grow and future-proof the sport. At the same time, society is evolving. People's lives are changing, people want shorter formats that are easier to understand and they want formats that are affordable to watch with the family.
Cricket has recognised this and the issues that it has in its appeal and relevancy. And so The Hundred has essentially been born out of that and our commitment to it and to growing the game.
The upshot of this from a TV perspective will be a new way of broadcasting the sport, he added. We are going to freshen things up and present things in a slightly different way
Player avatars
Created in conjunction with the ECB, the player avatars are part of the gamification of The Hundred, with Sky Sports on-screen talent and pundits due to present around them during pitch-side presentation elements within the coverage.
The avatars will help viewers to get a little bit closer to the players , said Henderson, and make the graphics more gamified and in tune with the target audience .
They were created using facial recognition and motion capture technology rather than the volumetric technique that Sky has used to great effect on its golf coverage with Sky Scope.
The decision to go with avatars rather than volumetric capture was purely practical, according to Sky Creative creative director of innovation Jason Landau, who was invited to talk to the ECB after it saw the impact of Sky Scope.
What is right for one sport isn't necessarily right for another, he said. With the cricket bowling [motion] it wasn't going to be feasible [to do volumetric]. At the same time, we'd been talking a lot about avatars. We'd seen how they were getting better in the overall look so we examined the pros and cons of doing a hyperreal avatar, and then capture the motion data. We thought it would be different but also engaging.
Using avatars rather than volumetric capture will also make it easier to re-skin if someone changes hairstyle or bat sponsor , Henderson added. Plus we can touch up hair, alter facial expressions and change things as we wish.
We were always worried about the motion capture shoots, but once the players had seen what we were trying to achieve, they really bought into it
The avatars themselves have been created using MetaStar, Dimension Studio's hyper-real avatar solution and the Augmented Reality experience created by Arcade (an immersive experience creative agency, using Unity).
Dimension Studio created the avatar faces using images from 19 stills cameras that captured a scan of each player's head. Those pictures were then animated, processed and stitched together before skin texture and detail was added.
Motion capture techniques were then used to generate the sporting action for each avatar body.
For this, Target 3D positioned 30 optical micro tracking cameras around each player. These triangulated the position of 50 optical markers that were placed on a bodysuit worn by the cricketers as they played different shots or went through their bowling action.
Motion capture gloves were also used to capture movement for bowling wrist and finger position, providing an extra level of detail.
The position of the markers was then used to calculate a skeleton that then drives the animation. The data capture session took
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
07/10/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, today announced the latest Long-Term Supported (LTS) release of Dalet Flex. Build...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
27/08/2026
ESPN and Disney are launching College Football Saturdays, adding two college football games per week to Disney for U.S. subscribers as part of their existing ...
27/08/2026
Zixi will exhibit at IBC2026 (Hall 5, Stand 5.A76, RAI Amsterdam, September 11-14), demonstrating the Zixi Platform and the latest release of Zixi Broadcaster, ...
27/08/2026
NDI has announced that its ecosystem has surpassed 1.2 million NDI-enabled hardware nodes worldwide, spanning products from more than 200 hardware brands across...
27/08/2026
Clear-Com conducted a pre-launch field trial of FreeSpeak Cell during Carnival 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, in partnership with Brazilian systems integrator Savana C...
27/08/2026
BHV returns to IBC 2026 with an important milestone for its own SportsBox: the broadcast industry's smallest remote vision mixer and format processor has mo...
27/08/2026
TOGETHXR and Snapchat have announced the second cohort of their Snap the Gap content creator program, welcoming nine athletes as Snap Stars. The program provide...
27/08/2026
MediaKind has announced that CNBC UK has selected Beam to modernize its contribution and distribution infrastructure for live broadcast operations. The deployme...
27/08/2026
Monitor engineer Chris Dwight has deployed Sennheiser's Spectera wideband bi...
27/08/2026
Telestream has announced an expansion of its UP cloud-native platform, adding capabilities for orchestrating Telestream services, third-party technologies, and ...
27/08/2026
Swerve TV has signed a multi-year partnership with GLORY Kickboxing, bringing live GLORY events and library programming to Swerve Combat, Swerve TV's free a...
27/08/2026
Dalet has announced a new integrated content experience with Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Dalet Flex, designed to bring AFP's editorial metadata into the p...
27/08/2026
Grass Valley will demonstrate an integrated live production environment at IBC2026 (Booth 9.A01, RAI Amsterdam, September 11-14), combining K-Frame, Maverik X, ...
27/08/2026
The National Women's Soccer League and Roku have announced an expanded partnership, with the Roku Sports Channel becoming the exclusive streaming home of ei...
27/08/2026
FuboTV has announced the launch of ACC Network Extra (ACCNX) and SEC Network (SECN ) on the Fubo streaming service at no additional cost to subscribers with En...
27/08/2026
Sports marketers have entered the experiential age. Today, sports teams, leagues, and venues are increasingly using immersive interactions and real world events...
27/08/2026
MultiDyne will introduce the MDoG-8800 at IBC2026 (Stand 11.C12, RAI Amsterdam, September 11-14), extending its openGear portfolio with a high-density fiber tra...
27/08/2026
The Joint Task Force on the Dynamic Media Facility (JT-DMF), an initiative of AMWA and the EBU, will host a series of informal Ask Me Anything sessions during...
27/08/2026
Homestream, a mobile app that automatically syncs a team's local radio broad...
27/08/2026
A packager for TNT Sports, Kwokman Productions is on hand for the unique event w...
27/08/2026
After more than 3,000 games, five members of YES Network's original staff re...
27/08/2026
Physical modelling orchestral instrument announced
Following their recent cryptic hints, Dreamtonics have officially revealed the latest addition to their s...
27/08/2026
M5 Ultra-equipped Studio most powerful Mac to date
Apple have just announced a design refresh which they say makes the Mac mini fiercer and more versatil...
27/08/2026
Sampler receivers major upgrades
Bitwig's latest DAW update brings some major changes to the Sampler device, kitting it out with new slicing options, tw...
27/08/2026
Designed specifically for hard-hitting modern bass
Designed specifically for bass-heavy electronic music, the latest plug-in from Arturia aims to offer an a...
27/08/2026
Advertisers gain granular CTV targeting and turnkey reporting across eligible in...
27/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
27/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
27/08/2026
Profuz Digital makes a mark by launching a powerful upgrade to its Profuz LAPIS digital media management platform this IBC in Amsterdam at Stand 8.A88. The late...
27/08/2026
DHD.audio has chosen IBC 2026 as the launch venue for what it defines as one of the most radical advances in the companys 30 year history.
Every broadcast trad...
27/08/2026
Direct connectivity between planning, production and graphics for creativity and streamlined workflows...
27/08/2026
New Photoshop innovations bring you more choice and control at every stage of yo...
27/08/2026
First Two Seasons of Vertical Series Vultures Shot on Blackmagic Design Cameras
Brie Clayton August 27, 2026
0 Comments
Director and DoP of Vultures ...
27/08/2026
For years, the media and entertainment industry has hesitated to use AI-voiced dubbing due to concern for audience experience. New data from 3Play Media, a glob...
27/08/2026
Starfish Technologies has announced the forthcoming V9 release of its Advantage AD workstation, adding support for voice synthesis services and giving Audio Des...
27/08/2026
Lightware's UBEX is a powerful AV-over-IP product well suited for rental and staging workflows where systems must be fast to deploy, easy to repurpose, and ...
27/08/2026
Lightware has expanded the scalability of its 10G TPN AV-over-IP platform with the introduction of the new TPN-MMU-X100 Matrix Management Unit, enabling systems...
27/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
27/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
27/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
27/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
27/08/2026
PlayBox Neo Stand 7.C29 IBC2026 - 11 14 September
Well-established global specialists in media playout, automation, and streaming solutions, PlayBox Neo ...
27/08/2026
Rise Academy, the broadcast and media skills charity dedicated to delivering practical media technology learning experiences, careers resources and work experie...
27/08/2026
Mediagenix, a global leader in smart content solutions to profitably connect the right content to the right audience, will showcase the latest evolution of its ...
27/08/2026
Screen Australia opens applications for Global Fellowships Program 27 August 2026
Applications are now open for the Screen Australia Global Fellowships progra...
27/08/2026
Thursday 27 August 2026
Sir Grayson Perry and Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Est...
27/08/2026
Wuppertal August 27, 2026
Riedel Evolves Leadership and Global Go-to-Market OrganizationRiedel Communications is strengthening its leadership and global go-to...
27/08/2026
More Sasquatch, more fun: Today, the sneakiest crossover of the summer lands exc...