CASE STUDY

Lost in Translation? Not on Our Watch: Remote Commentary for the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026

Client: ICC / Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 | Year: 2026

Services: Remote Commentary Delivery, Feed Distribution

The Challenge

International cricket draws a truly global audience, but reaching fans in their own language has traditionally meant flying commentators to every corner of the globe and absorbing the considerable costs that come with it. For a tournament of the scale and pace of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, that model is costly, complex, and increasingly hard to justify.

The brief was clear: deliver broadcast-quality alternate language commentary in Urdu, Mandarin, Japanese, and Bahasa Indonesian – simultaneously, reliably, and without putting a single commentator on a plane.

Pain Points

The Cost of Getting There

Sending commentary talent to site – flights, accommodation, per diems, equipment freight – adds up fast, especially across a multi-match international tournament. For established language markets that cost is manageable. For emerging ones, it’s often the reason the feed never gets made at all.

Technical Reliability Across Multiple Feeds

Running four simultaneous language feeds throughout a tournament demands infrastructure that simply cannot fail. Any single point of weakness – connectivity, audio path, cloud delivery – has a direct impact on the broadcast.

Timing and Synchronization

Commentary is only as good as its timing. Without low-latency video, commentators are calling action they can’t quite see, and the result is immediately apparent to the audience. Getting that right, remotely, across four languages, is no small task.

"This has been the most accessible T20 world cup ever for the ICC and you have played a very significant part in helping us achieve that."

– ICC

The Adapt Media Services Solution

We deployed our remote commentary kit to talent across the world – Urdu, Mandarin, Japanese, and Bahasa Indonesian commentators each set up in their own location, with no studio required. Once the kit was powered on, our engineering team took over remotely.

Each commentator connected to dual monitors: a dirty TX feed with full program output, graphics, and scores, and a clean fruit feed for reading the play. Low-latency video streams kept every caller locked to the action in near real-time – wherever they were in the world.

Connectivity was built for resilience.
Each kit supported multiple simultaneous IP connections for path redundancy, with high-powered 5G antennas providing automatic failover in locations where local internet infrastructure couldn’t be relied upon.

Audio followed a dual-cloud path.
High-quality, low-latency audio streamed simultaneously to two separate cloud environments – different regions, different providers – across all four feeds throughout the tournament.

Distribution was handled in real time.
Our team took the ICC international world feed, remixed the audio with each language track, and distributed all four feeds globally in parallel – independently managed, running simultaneously through the same infrastructure.

The Result

Urdu, Mandarin, Japanese, and Bahasa Indonesian audiences received broadcast-quality commentary throughout the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 – delivered entirely remotely, managed end-to-end by the Adapt Media Services engineering team.

Future Outlook

This project demonstrates what remote commentary infrastructure can look like at scale. As rights holders and broadcasters look to reach wider, more diverse audiences without the overhead of traditional production models, the blueprint is already proven.

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