Finding the Edge: How Badger & Combes Produces Live-Streamed Coverage of County Cricket for LancsTV

Finding the edge: How Badger & Combes produces live-streamed coverage of county cricket for LancsTV By Will Strauss

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 - 12:01

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English county cricket might not scream broadcast innovation' at first glance. But as Will Strauss discovers, at Lancashire County Cricket Club, a quiet revolution is underway.

Although an official County Championship was not established until 1890, county cricket has been played in England and Wales since the early 18th century. 1709 in fact.

A first-class' professional competition run by the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board), it is contested by 18 clubs, representing 17 of the historic counties of England and one from Wales. They play each other in four-day-long league matches in the County Championship, and in both 50-overs-per-side One-Day', and 20-overs-per-side T20', knockout cups.

While steeped in tradition, live county cricket coverage was, until recently, rudimentary at best. For non-broadcast matches, fans had to make do with single-camera streams and basic stats overlays.

But things are changing.

Lancashire County Cricket Club is among the clubs at the forefront of a transformation. Its official YouTube channel, LancsTV, delivers enhanced multi-camera live output, complete with replays, data, graphics, commentary, expert analysis, and fan engagement.

With digital technology, you don't necessarily need all the skills like you used to have back in the day. Now you can ask ChatGPT and YouTube and get the answer pretty much straight away!

At the heart of the operation is Badger & Combes, a Manchester-based digital media company responsible for producing live match coverage, highlights, archive content, and more.

Our primary objective is to help Lancashire Cricket navigate the digital growth of their brand, and expose them to an audience that is adaptable and changing, explains Badger & Combes founder and managing director Colin McKevitt (pictured below, left), who also serves as CIO of LancsTV.

Five years ago, Lancashire Cricket didn't have a live stream on YouTube for county cricket. So this is new. They would never previously have had to think about broadcast rights and how to manage their brand in a digital space, and a digital growth strategy. They do now.

At the time of writing, LancsTV had 171,000 subscribers on YouTube, with content also delivered to Facebook, to JioHotstar in India, and to Brightcove for the ECB's analysts to pore over.

To facilitate match coverage, Badger & Combes deploys a six or seven-camera set-up for County Championship games, and up to 13 cameras for T20s, operates a studio and gallery inside Lancashire's Old Trafford ground, and employs a full-time production crew.

Badger & Combes MD Colin McKevitt with SVG Europe editor Will Strauss inside the LancsTV studio

Having a studio space that you can just jump into at short notice to create content is crucial, says McKevitt. Being nimble is so important with a sport like cricket that stops for rain. If we know the weather's going to be bad, we will prep the studio ready to go. We have three or four cameras in there plus confidence monitors. We patch through to our gallery next door.

We'll move over to the corners as much as possible to get the cross shots, because it's quite narrow. And then we'll have our wide in the middle, or a secondary camera, if it's two people on screen. The trick is to try and use as little tech as possible and get the maximum out of it.

The last sentence of that quote sums up very nicely how McKevitt and his company operate. They are a digital production company operating at a broadcast level. To do that, they have to be agile, efficient and multi-skilled.

We do that throughout, continues McKevitt. Today, for example, one of our operators was out in the middle with an RF camera filming the coin toss [which decides who bats first]. Once that was done, he moved to a camera position at midwicket [which provides a side-on view of the action] for the first session of play. There's no value in having different camera operators for both of those activities because they don't happen at the same time.

It has to be like this because we can't have additional camera operators costing £1000 per day and survive as a business in this modern world.

If you look at camera operators that are worth their salt, and there are some fantastic ones out there who are very good at what they do, they're not only good at composing shots and being artistic, but they also know how to fix something when the camera goes wrong. You have to pay for that knowledge. You have to pay for that skill.

At the same time, with digital technology, you don't necessarily need to have all those skills like you used to have back in the day. Now you can ask ChatGPT and YouTube and get the answer pretty much straight away! I believe you have to exploit that knowledge to your benefit.

The gallery, which is adjacent to the studio, is equipped with a Blackmagic Design ATEM vision mixer and two channels of EVS for replays. For graphics and data, the set-up includes a combination of Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), vMix, NV Play, and Play Cricket Scorer (PCS) Pro.

It's a pretty standard gallery, says McKevitt. But where you could have different people doing graphics, audio, replay etc, we do it all from the one place with fewer people.

On the day that SVG Europe visited LancsTV, there was a director, a replay operator and a technician running the show.

This is the beauty of it, he adds. The director can sit here and make her own decisions. Why does somebody else need to press the [vision mixer] buttons? She's vision mixing, directing, she's doing the graphics, she's checking the scores, she's calling in the replays.

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