Kerry Packer, an Australian television tycoon who saw the moneymaking potential of cricket as a televised sport, signed up fifty-one of the world’s leading cricketers. Packer drove home the lesson that cricket was a marketable game, which could generate huge revenues. Television channels made money by selling television spots to companies who were happy to pay large sums of money to telecast commercials for their products to cricket’s captive television audience.
Television coverage changed cricket. It expanded the audience for the game by beaming cricket into small towns and villages. It also broadened cricket’s social base. Children who had never previously had the chance to watch international cricket because they lived outside the big cities, where top-level cricket was played, could now watch and learn by imitating their heroes.
The technology of satellite television and the world wide reach of multi-national television companies created a global market for cricket. Coloured dress, protective helmets, field restrictions, cricket under lights, became a standard part of the post-Packer game.
