Q: Why aren't there more independent video creators talking about all things cricket, like we have for football, NBA or baseball?

A thread:

Lack of Content: video, match highlights, full games, nothing is readily available to the fan. Videos are taken down aggressively through copyright claims. Broadcasters control content, which is fragmented by home boards having different rules and deals.

Lack of Data: Data analytics is in its infancy in cricket, not fully trusted or understood, and the domain of a few niche bloggers and analytics companies, who guard it for competitive and financial advantage.

Ball by ball data is hard to get, trajectory /play by play data is impossible to get for a common cricket fan. And most people are not acquainted with the level of math/stats/programming to make sense of it. Analytics pieces are a novelty.

The Lack of Games: MLB/NBA/Football leagues have many more games compared to cricket. There's a lot more to discuss. There's a lot more players/matchups/combinations.

That's changing in cricket with the advent of so many leagues, and you see healthy discourse on Twitter, with mock drafts and auctions, debates about team combinations etc.

Technical knowledge about cricket is esoteric and nuanced, confined to ex players, and hardly shared in the public domain. Things like Sky's Masterclass are exceptions, and treated with wonder by the general public. It's also hard to pick up in the absence of customised footage.

How many could've discerned that Kohli has a slightly open bat face in the death overs to enable him to hit through the offside, like he mentioned in a Masterclass episode?

Lack of Demand: simply put, the mass of cricket audience isn't mature enough yet. Debate and commentary in cricket circles devolves into the same limited set of cliches. Stats discourse is limited to averages and SRs. Cricket is truly a niche sport in most countries that play it.

The overall numbers are boosted by South Asian fans, but it's still not very "popular" like football.

Moreover, most of these fans engage with cricket as a partisan form of entertainment: supporting India, or supporting CSK. Cricket viewing hasn't evolved into intelligent watching. For instance, Sabermetrics is very common discourse among baseball fans.

Technical analysis is on all day and discussed by casual fans as well. That's not true of cricket.

The nature of the game is that it mostly unfolds in discrete packets in time. Spatial variation on the field happens slowly and in discrete jumps, so there's not much to analyse there, in the way of a play-by-play video.

Football/basketball evolve the whole field continuously in time, so there's much more to unpack and discuss. Cricket is more gradual and hidden.

The lack of a central body that compiles knowledge and data and sets the discourse is a factor too. People have too many different definitions.

Each broadcaster has its own agenda and there's no consensus on pushing advanced stats or analytics into the general discourse in a consistent way. This confuses the average fan and sets the barrier of entry too high to get into niche analytics.