ThreeNow, the New Zealand streaming service owned by media giant Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), has secured the broadcast rights to 2025 international action from the country’s Black Caps cricket national team.
Starting on July 14, the Black Caps will tour Zimbabwe, competing in a tri-series tournament against Zimbabwe and South Africa. The tournament is composed of six round-robin fixtures where each team plays each other twice across the 10 days following that opening fixture, followed by a showpiece final on July 26.
ThreeNow will showcase all seven games from the tri-series tournament and, in addition, will also air the two test matches between the Black Caps and Zimbabwe following the tournament, which will take place on July 30 and August 7, respectively.
Most of these games will begin at the unfavourable late timeslot of 11pm (for the tri-series tournament games) or 8pm (for the test matches) local time, which lends them to a streaming audience will be more amenable to delayed viewing.
This deal serves to further split the Black Caps’ broadcast rights across yet another domestic distributor.
Rights for the New Zealand national cricket teams’ home fixtures are currently held by public service broadcaster TVNZ in a deal running through the 2025-26 campaign.
After that, the rights to all bilateral international cricket played in the country will be held by pay-TV heavyweight Sky NZ, which last held the rights in 2020.
Sky NZ holds a host of cricket rights in the country, most prominently including the rights to major events organized by the sport’s International Cricket Council (ICC) global governing body through 2028.
Renewed in May, that deal covers 16 ICC events (having started with the 2024 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup earlier this year), and will run through the 2028 edition of that same competition, which New Zealand will co-host with India.
In September, the broadcaster also renewed its coverage of Indian home cricket internationals through its deal with the country’s BCCI governing body.
ThreeNow has streamed Black Caps action in the past, having briefly picked up the rights to the team’s two-match test series against Bangladesh in 2023,
