BusinessHub: Spark Sport's Jeff Latch pads up for a summer of cricket

After a Covid lull, Spark Sport is back into full gear with the compressed end to the English Premier League and this season's Formula 1 Championship finally under way.

Cricket is now part of the deal too, with new deals to show international highlights, English domestic cricket for four years and all domestic cricket for the next six seasons from this summer.

Spark Sport head Jeff Latch won't give numbers, but he says viewership for the EPL and F1 is running ahead of last year.

Notably, the service's social media channels are now generally filled with neutral or positive chatter around when highlights will appear and so forth. The queue of questions and complaints from the early days of F1 and EPL streaming last year, and the 2019 Rugby World Cup, seem to have largely dissipated.

In part, that's because today's Kiwi couch potato tends to be a lot more streaming-savvy, following the forced-education of 2019.

But Spark now has more streaming under its belt.

"The platform is so much more robust now than it was last year as you would expect, because we're 16 months old," Latch says.

"And so we are really well positioned to run with large numbers of people coming into our platform to watch a growing range of live content and VOD [video-on-demand] content."

Fans of streaming, and the anytime, anywhere wall-to-wall coverage it allows, will be hoping Latch is right.

But what if there are some wobbles for some viewers as a match seems to be heading toward a tight conclusion?

As there was during the Rugby World Cup - notably for the All Blacks-South Africa clash, whose second half was broadcast free-to-air - TVNZ is Spark Sport's partner for its cricket coverage.

Latch (a long-time TVNZ content director before moving to Spark) says the state broadcaster could be able to repeat its fallback role with TVNZ, if necessary, with the possible additional safety net of NZ Cricket being able to stream games through its own app or website.

There will be content on TVNZ regardless.

Under the terms of their partnership, TVNZ will broadcast:

• The first T20 Internationals of each series live (Blackcaps and White Ferns)
• Two regular-season men's Super-Smash matches per week
• Two regular-season women's Super-Smash matches per week

Rival Sky TV's near-monopoly on outside broadcasting production capability, from people to OB trucks, was historically regarded as a key "moat" against any new market entrant.

But that changed when the multinational NEP set up shop in New Zealand and within months was contracted by Spark Sport to produce its domestic hockey coverage.

And for its domestic cricket coverage, Spark Sport has appointed UK outfit Whisper, with former England Cricket captain Michael Vaughan appointed as an adviser on the project.

Whisper was founded in 2010 by ex-Formula One driver David Coulthard, Jake Humphrey - "the face of football for BT Sport" and Bafta award-winning producer Sunil Patel.

It promises a "storytelling" approach (see its show reel below).

What will that mean in reality? There'll be lots of on-demand extras, Latch says. One thing that Spark Sport has learned is that people want constant content updates, even when there are no games on. The service has already bulked up on profiles, vignettes and highlights. Expect more.

How did Coulthard's crew bag Spark Sport's business?

"We chose whisper as our production partner because we went out with a global RFP [request-for-proposals] process and seven of the world's largest production companies - particularly those that specialise in cricket production - applied," Latch says.

"And with Whisper we had this incredible synergy in terms of alignment between the vision that we have for New Zealand cricket and NZ's Cricket's vision for how they can actually bring that to life on screen. The opportunity with streaming is to have live coverage, but to also have then a range of supporting and ancillary content that actually creates real interest and depth in your coverage. Streaming platforms are unique in their ability to do that. It's very hard to do that with a linear [TV] channel."

There will be a fresh approach, Latch says.

Beyond the OnDemand extras and frills, all eyes will be on how Whisper and Spark Sport produce the live coverage.

If they prove their chops with cricket, then that will help clear the path for Spark to make a tilt at another A-list sport: domestic rugby - whatever form that will take when rights are next up for grabs in 2025.

That decision will be made in Spark's boardroom - but the enthusiasm of the discussion will be influenced by how successful Latch and his team are with their Black Caps and White Ferns coverage.

Postscript: How people are watching

Spark Sport won't give specific numbers for different types of device, but the big picture is that big TV screens are favoured over iPads and mobiles.

"Spark Sport customers mostly enjoy watching our content through the big screen with Google Chromecast as the most popular means of streaming it to the telly," a spokesman says.

"The second most popular way to watch is through PCs with a portion of those also connected to the TV via an HDMI cable, followed closely by Smart TVs and Apple TV streaming devices."

Watch the BusinessHub video for the full interview.