While cricket's free-to-air return is celebrated, everything's too quiet on the digital front

SAM MORSHEAD: In a quirk of fate, this freely accessible element of cricket’s media landscape disappeared at the moment the longest format of the sport returned to terrestrial television for the first time since that famous Ashes campaign

India v England: 1st Test scorecard

Talking Points: Pant's on fire and England are exceptional

The UK TV rights saga around the India-England series is well documented, but there is less clarity over what has happened to digital clips.

England cricket fans have become accustomed to snippets of the action posted within minutes on the social media platforms of partner broadcasters and the ECB in recent years - shareable, easily consumable, thoroughly accessible content which engages younger demographics.

While there has been due celebration for Test cricket’s return to free-to-air television on Channel 4, it has not escaped many in the industry that a fair chunk of the sport’s engagement with young people is currently missing from the ongoing series.

While C4 have acquired exclusive broadcast rights, including highlights packages which have appeared on its streaming platform All4 in the mid to late afternoon, the channel has had very limited digital presence thus far.

That is not a barb at C4 in particular. With the minutiae of the agreement not in the public domain, there is no explanation of who owns the rights to show clips - the BCCI, host broadcaster Star Sports, or another party - but it is painfully obvious that someone is not using them properly.

The digital landscape has been spookily low-key for what is currently the biggest event in cricket: memes, gifs and screengrabs aplenty but little by way of video from the ground.

That tumbleweed effect has been tangible through the first three days of this match. Joe Root’s double century, Virat Kohli’s dismissal to Dom Bess, Root’s sensational catch of Ajinkya Rahane and Rishabh Pant’s thunderous counter-attack ought to have all been shared, commented on and celebrated via the medium of social media.

A single, powerful sporting moment might draw a great crowd on its own, but it is through social amplification that its reach exponentially increases.

^{Channel 4 reported that nearly 1million people watched Joe Root reach his century on Friday}

Channel 4, for instance, reported that nearly 1million people watched Joe Root reach his century on Friday - a fantastic number in any cricketing context that relies purely on broadcast viewing figures.

Sky Sports' Black Lives Matter feature, incorporating the testimony of Ebony Rainford-Brent and Michael Holding, would have received a fraction of that during its live screening on the first morning of the West Indies series last summer. But Holding's subsequent monologue has been viewed more than 7million times on Twitter alone since.

The most engaging video circulating from the current Test match has been Kohli stretching off Root’s cramp - the paucity of content highlighted by the overblown reaction to a fairly routine event between sportsmen.

Ask anyone in sport’s digital media sector, and they will wax lyrical about the effect of digital clips on their reach and engagement - two crucial growth metrics - over the course of the past five years.

Extensive research shows that younger demographics digest content in a very different way to their elders, and that linear TV consumption among most age groups has been in decline for a decade. 

Channel 4’s initial viewing figures for their day one programming showed that seven per cent of its 434,000 average viewers were aged 35 or under, and while their peak Saturday audience of 1.4million was larger than the Sky peak of 988,000 during the Saturday of the second Sri Lanka Test, Sky would expect to reach considerably more people than C4 once their digital clips had been thrown into the mix. 

Those clips - short, in-the-moment, shareable and exciting - elevate the profile of a sport or a particular match, acting as the trailer for the movie you never knew you wanted to see. 

They are, in their own way, a branch of free-to-air television for the generations who have been brought up in a world of on-demand services; where waiting for four or five hours at the end of play for a highlights package feels positively archaic. 

In a quirk of fate, this freely accessible element of cricket’s media landscape has disappeared - temporarily at least - at the moment the sport has been returned to terrestrial television for the first time since that famous Ashes campaign 16 years ago.

When Michael Vaughan lifted the urn at The Oval in 2005, Facebook was limited to those with an academic email address; Twitter was but a twinkle in the eyes of a pair of Google employees; and sports audiences were trained either to watch live or make time for the highlights.

Today, copies of the Radio Times will draw the same perplexed expressions as a modem or rotary dial. Rightly, on-demand generations expect content to be tailored to their schedules. And media providers or organisations who do not do this will become increasingly invisible.

It might be that a combination of circumstances and the red tape of cricket’s famous bureaucrats has led to the current scenario, but make no mistake: it is harder to inspire generations when you do not speak their language.

Some will argue that this is only a small bump in the road, that the deal was hastily arranged, that there's no reason for complaint because anyone can just turn on their telly. It is dangerous to dismiss the viewing habits of at least two generations so flippantly. Yes, it might only be one series, but that is one series too many. Free-to-air won't fix all of cricket's accessibility issues in this country, but removing great swathes of it from digital platforms will only make things worse.