[madmusician]

Bit of a random one that, with Channel 5 not having showed any cricket since 2019 and losing all other sport bar NFL (Premiership Rugby and EFL highlights) over recent years (bar the England v. Barbarians rugby match in June). Saying that, all of the other terrestrial channels were out of the loop cricket-wise for a few years before they showed the CWC. 

Compared to the previous Cricket on 5, this shouldn't be much cost outside of the rights payment, with world feed commentary mandatory in broadcasts. By the looks of it, programmes could be aired at the traditional time of 19:00 due to the timezone of India - which is far better than when the 2015 highlights were almost 24 hours late, airing after the News at Ten (likely at Sky's behest one would imagine).

Yes, I'd agree that the production costs will be far less than the ECB contract that C5 used to hold.

When Channel 4 had the 2019 Cricket World Cup highlights, they were very canny with the production - Sunset and Vine produced their highlights and they were also the ICC's host broadcaster, which meant that the C4 highlights could fit in with the overall host broadcast operation.  In fact, there were three types of programme that C4 showed during that tournament:

- S&V produced them bespoke highlights programmes (presented by Isa Guha, and featuring a variety of talking heads) for England matches, plus the three knock-out matches (two of which featured, England, of course)

- For most other matches, they just used the generic ICC TV highlights programmes (produced by S&V for the world feed), introduced out-of-vision by one of the commentary team

- As the ICC TV programmes were produced on a 'per match' basis, not a 'per day' basis, S&V produced bespoke programmes for C4 when there were two matches in a day, with shorter edits to fit both matches into an hour. These were hosted by VoiceOver but specifically for the C4 programme

It was a good system, as all of the programmes used the same titles and music packages, and all featured the ICC TV commentary feed, of course.

The difference this time is that it is Star producing the ICC TV coverage, rather than S&V, so there might not be the ability to integrate so well into the host broadcaster operation this time round.  I fully suspect that C5 will just be banging out the ICC TV highlights programmes for most of the matches (and that most of them will be late at night, too) but you'd have thought that they might give England matches some better production, especially if they are being shown at 7pm.