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 ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
The Hundred: Sky Sports and the ECB turn to gamification as cricket is freshened up for a new audience By Will Strauss, Editor 
