How cricket TV rights work
The board hosting the match sells the rights
There is no global feed for cricket. The rights to a match belong to the board that is hosting it, and that board sells them territory by territory. So Australia v India played in Melbourne is Cricket Australia's to sell, while India v Australia played in Mumbai is the BCCI's, even though it is the same two teams. Different seller, different broadcaster, different country-by-country answer.
This is the single fact that explains most bad cricket listings. An article written for an Indian reader will name the Indian channel and stop, and a reader in Britain will take that name, search for it, and find it is not on there.
The same match, five different answers
A bilateral series on Indian soil is a good example. In India it is on the JioStar channels with streaming on JioHotstar. In the United States and Canada it is usually Willow. In the United Kingdom it is TNT Sports, because TNT bought the rights to everything played in India under a five-year deal, while Sky holds England's home summer and the ICC events it packages. In Australia it may be Fox Sports, or it may be on nothing at all.
The UK split catches people out, including professional outlets: a widely copied country table we checked while building this site named Sky Sports Cricket for India's home internationals, which is wrong. Getting it right matters, because a reader who buys the wrong subscription has lost real money.
Why some matches are not on anywhere
A large share of the cricket played in any given week is not televised, and that is not a gap in the research: it is the answer.
Sub-regional qualifiers are free. The ICC streams its T20 World Cup sub-regional qualifiers on icc.tv at no cost, with FanCode carrying them in India. No broadcaster buys them, because no broadcaster would pay for a Malaysia v Maldives fixture. A listing that names a pay-TV channel for one of these is wrong, and this is a mistake we made and corrected.
Domestic cricket stays home. The Ranji Trophy is carried in India and nowhere else. The Sheffield Shield is on Cricket Australia's own platform inside Australia. The CSA T20 Challenge is on SuperSport in South Africa. None of them is televised in the other four countries this site covers, and a reader outside those countries simply cannot watch them.
Some competitions are only partly shown. This is the hardest case, and the Ranji Trophy is the clearest example: several sources describe “selected matches” going to Star Sports and JioHotstar and the same sources warn that the rest are not shown. A fixture-level answer cannot be inferred from a competition-level fact, so for those fixtures this site shows no channel rather than inventing one.
How to read a listing here
Every row on the schedule is produced by a written rule, and the row tells you which rule and where it came from. Open one and you will see the television answer, the streaming answer, the date a person last checked it, and a link to the page that answer rests on. If you disagree with a row, you can follow that link to the source and see for yourself, which is the point.
Where nothing could be confirmed, the row says so. This site is built on the rule that a missing source is better than a confident wrong answer, so a blank row means we could not establish the answer, not that there is nothing to watch.
Checking a listing yourself
If you want to verify a match independently, search for the two team names plus the words “where to watch” and the country you are in, then prefer the results that name the channel for that match. Be sceptical of any page that prints one table covering several countries at once: that is one source about several countries, not several sources, and it is how a single error spreads across the web.
90 rules behind the schedule, drawing on 94 distinct sources. The whole table is published on the rights reference.