The International Cricket Council (ICC) has said the Women’s Cricket World Cup 2022 was the most digitally engaged ICC women’s event ever and which is another major milestone for the sport.

Recording an extraordinary 1.64 billion total video views across ICC channels, the event in New Zealand, is the third most digitally engaged ICC event ever behind the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2019 and the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021.

The ICC content enjoyed by fans around the world was a 45 percent increase on the record-breaking Women’s T20 World Cup 2020, which garnered 1.1 billion views and 16 times more than the 100 million views from the previous 50-over World Cup in England in 2017, the global cricket body said in a statement.

Fans embraced all ranges of videos, from highlights (the No.1 video on Facebook was the highlights from India v Pakistan) through to the heart-warming scenes of the Indian players meeting the Pakistan captain Bismah Maroof and her baby Fatima, which was the tournament’s most popular video on Instagram.  Instagram Reels was the fastest growing platform, with the video of Jess Jonassen’s one-handed catch to dismiss Katherine Brunt performing the best, topping 13.5 million views.

Engagements on ICC social media platforms, including shares, likes and comments across this year’s 31-match tournament, smashed all targets totalling 164 million, exactly doubling the 82 million seen in the Women’s T20 World Cup in 2020.

App and website users also reached new heights with close to three times as many users than for the Australia 2020 tournament with a total of 10.3 million users.

The number of female fans enjoying ICC content is also continuing to rise with 22 percent of web users being female during the tournament in New Zealand in 2022, compared to 20 percent during the Men’s T20 World Cup 2021, and 13 percent during Women’s T20 World Cup 2020.

ICC Digital took the “you can’t be what you can’t see” mantra off the field, too, with the official preview and review shows featuring an all-female hosting panel.

From a broadcast perspective, the overall cumulative global dedicated TV audience was 104.8 million, with Indian channels delivering a large share of the total audience, whilst the audience for live TV and digital combined was 82.8 million.

Coverage across live, highlights and repeats programming, amounted to 10,308 broadcast hours for the New Zealand tournament 2022, which was a significant increase from the 3974 hours at the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2020.

The total viewing hours for the tournament were 215.2 million up by 47.4 percent from the Australia 2020 event.

For the first time ever the broadcast coverage was delivered in four additional languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.

ICC Chief Executive Geoff Allardice said in a statement: “We are absolutely delighted with the record-breaking digital fan engagement numbers of the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2022. As a key strategic pillar to growing the game our focus has been deepening engagement with existing fans and bringing new audiences to the sport. The innovative approach to creating heroes in the women’s game and taking the sport closer to fans has resulted in world leading numbers.

“The competitive nature of cricket and the excitement generated around the tournament has put us in a great position to continue to build on the success of this year’s event. With the focus now on providing fans with more engaging content throughout the 100 percent Cricket Year of Women’s Cricket leading into the inaugural U19 and senior Women’s T20 World Cups in early 2023.”