Summers a comin’ and with the long hot days comes the hot, long summer cricket series.
But how does one stay up to date while airbourne?
Well, fear not cricket fans of Australia! Qantas will be streaming matches LIVE during flights.
You read that right, you can stay up to date with every bowl and bat 39,000 feet above ground.
According to News.com.au, Qantas will broadcast 75 matches of the coming cricket series played on Australian turf this summer via the airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi.
The catch of course is that it will only be streamed to domestic flights.
The streamed matches will include the Commonwealth Bank Women’s Ashes T20 matches, Magellan Men’s Ashes, the Gillette One Day Internationals and T20s, the KFC Big Bash League and Rebel WBBL.
In a statement Qantas chief customer officer Olivia Wirth said, “Qantas is proud to support the men’s and women’s teams through our Cricket Australia partnership, and as part of that we’re able to offer more than 400 hours of live cricket over the season to around 60,000 customers in-flight every week.”
“Our goal is to give our customers the best in-flight Wi-Fi experience in Australia.”
“We’ve partnered with the best in entertainment and we’re offering it for free,” Wirth said.
“Our mantra of serving cricket fans wherever they are, is going to the next level with this fantastic initiative,” Cricket Australia Executive GM of Broadcasting Ben Amarfio added.
“This unique partnership allows us to deliver on that even when cricket fans are 30,000 feet in the air. Courtesy of Qantas, cricket fans won’t miss a ball of action.”
Qantas installed Wi-Fi hardware on 15 Boeing 737 aircraft earlier this year and has scheduled to install the technology into its domestic airbuses from next year.
“The customer trial on our first Wi-Fi aircraft helped us finetune the system and we’re pleased to be switching the system on across the domestic fleet,” Wirth added.
