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By continuously integrating the latest new-media advances while still predominantly relying on older broadcast models, contemporary mediated sport affords an interesting paradox. That is, while most well-known sports provide “digitized” processes, platforms and applications, these technologies primarily complement the televised coverage. Thus, despite assumptions of a decline in broadcast media, the televisual representation of sport often remains paramount in terms of viewership, circulation (or its online replication) and broadcasting rights. This is especially true for “mega” sporting events that generate widespread interest and often attract large, diverse audiences to their live global telecasts outside of normal viewing hours.
My article considers these contemporary trends through a specific examination of the 2015 Cricket World Cup (CWC) and its global televised representations. As a televised sport, cricket continually integrates emerging technologies and tools to aesthetically revamp its re-presentation to attract and retain large international audiences. Cricket’s specific televised technological innovations and refinements blur the lines of information, entertainment and commodification, while allowing a traditional broadcast-media form to be re-presented in non-traditional ways. That is, cameras and other technologies often operate in fluid and highly mobile ways by floating above, encroaching upon, mapping over, or being embedded within the field of play. In combination, such technological perspectives provide an intensified visual navigation of the cricket-scape and position viewers as fluid spectator-tourists. Cameras and, by implication, viewers are increasingly allowed to enter the field of play and navigate nimbly among the spaces and competitors of live sport. Furthermore, there is a stylistic orientation towards extraneous exploration, as the agile cameras (e.g. Steadicams, Segways, Spidercams and drones) fluidly roam and float across the cricket-scape and its surrounds, often dipping into and out of the on-field action.
In what is presented as a global “mega-event”, these contrasting technologies and multiple perspectives provide affective layers for broader viewer engagement, aesthetically rendering the CWC as a televised sports “spectacular” for both casual and engaged viewers of live TV broadcasts.
