While SBS is clearly enjoying its
strongest ever sustained viewing figures courtesy of its free-to-air
Ashes coverage, pay TV has also been experiencing a surge in interest
from not only cricket fans but those who don’t normally watch the game.

As Adam Oakes, Marketing director of Fox Sports, told Crikey,
the channel’s Ashes viewer numbers are “absolutely above our best
expectations.”

“In
fact I would say we would be close to getting double what I originally
thought we might attract given viewers also have the choice of watching
it on SBS; where otherwise with the big overseas cricket tours like
India in recent years, we’ve had them to ourselves,” he said today.

Certainly
the Ashes provide one of the very few occasions when both free-to-air
and pay TV are showing exactly the same event in synch, so purely
concentrating on the usual free-to-air ratings doesn’t give you the
full picture of just who is watching in Australia.

While Fox
Sports won’t reveal actual viewer numbers, Oakes confirms that with the
cricket carried by both Foxtel and Austar, the Fox coverage is well out
in front as the most watched subscription channel on both networks.
Oakes says that with Fox viewers also having access to SBS they are
still going for the Fox coverage in preference, but this bias becomes
more pronounced as the night gets later.

Currently with pay TV
penetration around 25% of Australian homes which Foxtel says translates
as about 1.8 million homes, my educated guess is that about one in
seven of those households is tuning into the cricket and that there may
be somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 homes catching it via Fox.
Oakes also confirms massive interest from advertisers with all
available series slots booked out.

“The cricket is obviously
producing fantastic changes of fortune, and we know it is also
appealing to people who don’t ordinarily bother to watch cricket,” he
observes. “It’s now obviously a major conversational point for people
everywhere, and I know I can hardly go to a meeting without someone
bringing up the cricket, particularly if there’s a Pom in the room,” he
joked.

While Channel Nine missed the runaway train the Ashes
has become, it will still reap the massive upsurge in interest from the
cricket world at large when Australia takes on the world’s best
opposition Test and ODI teams in the ICC Super Series in Sydney and
Melbourne in October. Given this will include England’s emerging
superstars, particularly Andy Flintoff, the Super Series offers the ICC
an almost immediate opportunity to increase the longer term dividends
to cricket internationally as the Ashes battle captures the imagination
of all cricket fans around the world, and many who previously weren’t.