Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed his enthusiasm for the ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup, highlighting the increased participation of teams this year.

In a post on X, Mr. Pichai shared his excitement for the global growth of his favourite sport, which is being celebrated with a dedicated Google Doodle.

“More teams than ever will participate in the ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup this year. Exciting to see my favorite sport growing globally – and celebrated in today’s #Doodle. First toss is in a few hours – good luck to all the teams!” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The ICC T20 World Cup 2024 kickstarted on June 2 in the USA and West Indies.

This tournament is the ninth edition since it started in 2009. The United States is the host nation this year, and a record 20 teams from around the world will compete on the big stage. The teams are divided into four groups of five for the group stage, and face off against every other country in their group once.

The ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup gives the best men’s cricketers in the world the opportunity to show off their skills and represent their nation. The ICC T20 World Cup will be played in the West Indies and the USA from June 1 to 29.

The USA and Canada will lock horns against each other in the tournament’s opener at the Grand Prairie Stadium on Sunday.

In the tournament, India will be aiming to end their ICC trophy drought, having last won the ICC Champions Trophy in 2013.Since then, India has reached the 50-over World Cup final in 2023, semifinal in 2015 and 2019, the title clash of the ICC World Test Championship in 2021 and 2023, T20 WC final in 2014, semifinals in 2016 and 2022 but failed to secure a big ICC trophy.

India will be aiming to win their first T20 WC title since they won the inaugural edition of the tournament back in 2007 in South Africa. In the last edition held in Australia in 2022, India lost to England by 10 wickets in the semifinals.

India T20 WC Squad:

Rohit Sharma (c), Hardik Pandya, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Rishabh Pant, Sanju Samson, Shivam Dube, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Arshdeep Singh, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj.

This aerial photo taken on May 1, 2024 shows the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York, ahead of the ICC T20 World Cup 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

In a first for Indian sports streaming, the ICC Men’s T20 cricket World Cup will be streamed with Hindi audio description and Indian Sign Language (ISL) for visually and hearing impaired viewers, Disney+ Hotstar, the streaming service with the rights to stream the tournament this year announced on Wednesday. Reports peg the tournament’s media value between ₹1,600–2,000 crore. 

“Being the first OTT platform to introduce this feature for live cricket, we are democratizing the game … and have made this feature available for 10 matches, including India matches, semifinals and finals during the tournament,” Sajith Sivanandan, head of Disney+ Hotstar told The Hindu in response to an emailed questionnaire. 

Also read | ICC Twenty20 World Cup 2024: full schedule, dates and venues

While the ISL interpretation of commentary is new for streaming, Disney had streamed some matches of the Indian Premier League with a Hindi descriptive track in 2022. JioCinema, which owns the rights to the franchise now, does not have closed captioning, ISL interpretation or a descriptive audio track in any language. The ICC men’s ODI World Cup attracted a maximum of 5.9 crore concurrent viewers on Hotstar, a figure that is half of what pre-qualifier matches in the current season of the IPL are racking up online. 

Star Sports, which has IPL’s TV broadcast rights, announced similar accessibility features last month. “We aim to make our entertainment content accessible for the deaf, hard of hearing and visually impaired communities on VOD (video on demand) and live content over the next 12-18 months,” Mr. Sivanandan said. He added that most of upcoming Hotstar’s special programming will have closed captioning and audio description tracks — though such features for content licensed from studios remains inconsistent at best across streaming platforms. 

A review of accessibility features on streaming platforms in India by The Hindu last year found that most platforms have limited availability of same-language closed captioning or audio description for their content, with the steepest gap for films licensed from studios. 

The IT Rules, 2021 include a recommendation for streaming platforms to make their content accessible to differently abled users, but most work in this regard has been through the industry’s own practices, and the government has not visibly exerted pressure to facilitate accessibility on OTT platforms.