Prime Video announces immersive and localised LIVE cricket experience for marquee India men’s tour of New Zealand from November 18
India’s most-loved streaming service, Prime Video, amps up the excitement around the much-anticipated India men’s tour of New Zealand beginning 18th November, with a series of announcements that are sure to delight fans.
India and New Zealand, both of whom have had a good T20I campaign in Australia, will face-off in a limited overs series featuring three T20s and 3 ODIs that will be played between Nov 18th and Nov 30th. The series will be LIVE and exclusive only on Prime Video, the official India territory rights holder to exclusively stream all men’s and women’s cricket matches played in New Zealand.
Talking about the upcoming series, Sushant Sreeram, director - SVOD business, Prime Video, India said -
“There are many things that are heterogenous about the delightfully diverse India when it comes to entertainment – be it choice of language, genres of shows and movies, devices that customers prefer watching their favourite entertainment on, and so much more. But there is one absolute unifier that everyone across the country is unanimously passionate about, and that’s cricket! With our slate of compelling shows and movies over the last 6 years, we have strived to super-serve our customers, and they have emphatically picked Prime Video as their most loved entertainment destination."
"Now with live cricket, made immersive and accessible with multi-language feeds, fantastic studio programming and a superb set of commentators to take us through the series, we are confident we are not just going to deliver on a superior experience for the legions of cricket fans in the country, but make Prime Video that much more exciting, delightful and the first choice of entertainment for everyone.”
“India and New Zealand have both been at the top of their white ball games in the recent past and we expect some explosive cricket in the coming weeks from two of the best teams in the world as the cricketing action now moves from Australia to New Zealand,” Sreeram added.
Prime Video will deliver live commentary and match-programming in English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. Fans will also be treated to graphics in these languages.
Former captains and cricketers like Ravi Shastri, Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, Gundappa Viswanath, Anjum Chopra, Venkatpathy Raju, among others, will be bringing the matches alive with their insightful commentary in different languages as India tries to set the record straight against New Zealand. The BlackCaps knocked the Men in Blue out of the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup, and also defeated India in the inaugural World Test Championship final in 2021.
The full slate of commentators for the series includes the following names:
English - Ravi Shastri, Harsha Bhogle, Anjum Chopra, Simon Doull and Murali Kartik, Gaurav Kapoor –(Presenter)
Hindi - Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, Ajay Jadeja, Mohammad Kaif and Ajit Agarkar
Tamil - WV Raman, Hemang Badani and L Sivaramakrishnan, S Sriram
Kannada - Gundappa Viswanath, Veda Krishnamurthy, Shankar Prakash, Venkatesh Prasad, K Jeshwant
Telugu - Venkatpathy Raju, Sunitha Anand, Sudhir Malwvedi, Vijay Malwvedi
The cricket experience for the fans doesn’t stop here. Prime Video will also offer an English language live one-hour pre-show before each game. The mid-innings break will feature a 15 minute show which will be a recap of the first innings and preview of the second. The live programming also involves a 30 minute post-match presentation and analysis by Prime Video’s stable of cricket experts.
Curating a new viewing experience for live sports, Prime Video will offer customers new features like in-game language selector and “Rapid Recap”. The in-game language selector will allow customers to change language (e.g., English to Hindi) seamlessly without exiting the player. Customers joining a game in progress can catch-up on impactful game highlights using the “Rapid Recap” feature before transitioning to the live stream automatically.
India men’s tour of New Zealand will be the first LIVE cricket series on Prime Video to feature advertisements, helping brands reach Prime Video’s premium base of highly engaged customers, spread across the country. Prime Video welcomed Airtel Xstream Fiber as the presenting sponsor of the broadcast featuring the six limited overs international matches. Consumer brands like MPL, Nescafé, Noise, OLX Autos, and Vida have come on board as associate sponsors. In addition, brands like AMFI and DBS have also confirmed as advertisers.
To watch the matches, consumers can go to the Prime Video app on their respective devices where they will be able to find the live match featured on the home page. On Android and Smart TV devices they can select the Cricket tab in the top navigation. The landing page of the Cricket section will feature LIVE matches as well as full playbacks of previous matches.
Consumers can choose a language stream of their choice to enjoy the match. The page will also feature the key highlights of the matches – Super Sixes and short highlights, for quick catch-up. Fans can stream these matches online through their web browser, mobile devices, internet-connected TVs, set-top-boxes, Fire TV sticks and other compatible devices. For a list of devices compatible with Prime Video, or to sign up, please visit primevideo.com.
As a part of the multi-year partnership, international men’s and women’s cricket matches played in New Zealand across all formats – will be available exclusively on Prime Video India.