Anyone For Cricket, Soccer, Rugger?

Consider the above photo and then reflect on the point Chris Anderson makes on how the web will allow sports popular to break the broadcast monopoly.

Take cricket. It’s huge in Commonwealth countries, as well as the Subcontinent and the rest of the former British Empire. In India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand the the UK, all the big cricket matches are broadcast live on TV. Elsewhere they’re virtually impossible to find. According to the economics of broadcast TV, this makes sense: you can only devote your scarce airwaves to content of mass appeal. But there are millions of cricket fans outside of those few concentrated markets. And they’re as eager to watch live (or even recorded) cricket matches as their home-bound countrymen. Now, thanks to streaming web video, they can.

There are about 25 million people in the Indian Diaspora, most of whom are in countries that don’t broadcast cricket on TV. Think of them as the Cricket Diaspora, a distributed audience of potentially immense scale. The same for the Rugby Diaspora, the Soccer Diaspora, the Sumo Diaspora and so on.

Erm, Sumo? Anyway. Just to make the point – the an image of a crowd we found at a soccer park in New York’s Lower East Side at a Nike 5 a side competition. The face of America is changing and with these demographic shifts, non-’American’ sports may become the mainstream whether the old guard like it or not.

The Long Tail: The Cricket Diaspora

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