Watch Every Ball of England’s Cricket Summer on IPTV

Key Takeaways

• The Hundred 2026 runs Tuesday 21 July to Sunday 16 August, with both finals played at Lord’s on the closing day.
• Three teams enter the season under new names after a wave of private investment: Oval Invincibles are now MI London, Northern Superchargers are Sunrisers Leeds, and Manchester Originals are Manchester Super Giants.
• Sky Sports Cricket shows every single match live, all 68 games across the men’s and women’s competitions.
• The BBC’s free-to-air coverage is limited to a reported 16 matches on BBC Two and iPlayer, with every game covered on BBC Sounds radio instead.
• A new combined trophy rewards the team performing best across both the men’s and women’s tables, a first for the tournament.
• If your household already has Sky Sports through separate boxes or apps, an IPTV setup through something like ZumTV puts the whole tournament on one screen without adding a new subscription.

Cricket’s shortest, loudest format is back, and this year it looks genuinely different on the scorecard before a ball’s even bowled. Three of the eight franchises have new names, new owners, and new kit colours. Here’s what’s actually changed, who’s showing it, and where the coverage gaps sit if you’re planning your summer around it.

When The Hundred 2026 Runs

The tournament opens on Tuesday 21 July with a double-header at the Kia Oval and runs through to Sunday 16 August, when both finals are played at Lord’s on the same day. That’s 34 matchdays across the men’s competition, 32 group games plus the Eliminator and the Final, with the women’s tournament running the same schedule as a paired fixture at every venue.

Each of the eight teams plays eight group matches, four at home and four away, before the top three in each table go through to the knockouts. Second plays third in the Eliminator at the Kia Oval on 14 August, with the winner facing the top-placed side in the Final two days later.

Kick-off times vary through the tournament. Most men’s matches start at 6:30pm BST on weekday evenings, with women’s matches generally starting around 3pm on the same day at the same ground. Weekend fixtures shift earlier, with some double-headers starting as early as 11am. On finals day, the women’s final gets underway at 2:15pm BST and the men’s final follows at 6pm.

Three Teams, New Names: What Actually Changed

This is the headline story of the 2026 edition, and it’s worth explaining properly because it trips up even regular viewers checking the fixture list for the first time.

Since the 2025 season ended, all eight Hundred franchises sold stakes to outside investors, raising more than £500 million split between the 18 first-class counties and grassroots cricket funding. For most teams that meant new money behind the scenes with the name staying put. For three teams, it meant a full rebrand.

Oval Invincibles are now MI London. Reliance Industries, who also own five-time IPL champions Mumbai Indians, took a 49% stake and brought the branding with it. The team that dominated recent seasons, three straight men’s titles, switches from green to a blue-and-gold kit matching its Mumbai counterpart.

Northern Superchargers are now Sunrisers Leeds. The Sun Group, owner of IPL side Sunrisers Hyderabad, took full ownership and moved the reigning women’s champions from purple and white into orange and black.

Manchester Originals are now Manchester Super Giants. RPSG Group, which owns Lucknow Super Giants in the IPL, acquired a 70% stake and shifted the kit from black and grey into red, white and yellow.

The other five franchises, Birmingham Phoenix, London Spirit, Southern Brave, Trent Rockets and Welsh Fire, kept their names, though several picked up new investors and refreshed kits regardless. Southern Brave took investment from GMR Group, co-owners of IPL side Delhi Capitals, and changed colours from green to blue and red without touching the name. Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly acquired a 49% stake in Trent Rockets, and Real Madrid and England footballer Jude Bellingham took a small stake in Birmingham Phoenix earlier this year.

Four of the eight teams now carry direct IPL ownership links, which tells you plainly where the tournament’s growth money is coming from in 2026.

Who’s Showing What: Sky Sports and the BBC Gap

Sky Sports remains the home of The Hundred, and its coverage is comprehensive. Every one of the 68 matches, all 34 men’s games and all 34 women’s games, airs live on the dedicated Sky Sports Cricket channel, with streaming access through Sky Go and NOW for anyone not on a full Sky box.

The BBC’s role is where the coverage genuinely thins out, and it’s worth being precise about this because different sources report slightly different figures. The Hundred’s own site and BBC reporting both point to 16 matches shown live on BBC Two and iPlayer this year, down from the mix of men’s and women’s fixtures the BBC has carried in previous seasons. Every match, without exception, is covered ball by ball on BBC Sounds radio, and highlights run on iPlayer and the BBC Sport website daily regardless of whether a given match was shown live.

Practically, that means the vast majority of this summer’s cricket sits behind a Sky subscription. If you’re used to catching a chunk of the tournament for free on BBC Two, worth checking the confirmed BBC schedule for 2026 specifically rather than assuming last year’s split carries over unchanged, because the free-to-air slate has narrowed compared with earlier editions.

Setting Up IPTV to Watch Every Ball of England’s Cricket

If your household is already paying for Sky Sports, whether through a Sky box, NOW, or a Sky-inclusive TV package, the practical question isn’t access, it’s convenience. Juggling Sky’s own app across a Firestick in the living room, a smart TV in the kitchen and a phone for the commute gets old fast over a five-week tournament with matches most weekday evenings.

An IPTV setup like ZumTV brings the channels you’re already subscribed to into one interface, with a single electronic programme guide across every device rather than switching apps depending on which screen you’re near. It’s worth being direct here, the same way it matters for any sport: ZumTV doesn’t hold Sky’s Hundred broadcasting rights and isn’t claiming to. It’s a companion layer that organises access you already have, not a way around paying for it.

Setup is straightforward on the usual devices, Fire TV Stick, Android TV box, or a smart TV with a native app, using a third-party player such as IPTV Smarters Pro or TiviMate to load your provider’s playlist and populate the EPG. Parental controls, useful with evening matches running past younger kids’ bedtimes, live inside that player app rather than in ZumTV itself, so check the PIN-lock settings in whichever app you’re running.

For anyone splitting attention between the men’s and women’s competitions running as a double-header most evenings, a properly synced EPG is genuinely useful. Being able to glance ahead and see the 3pm women’s start and the 6:30pm men’s follow-up on the same guide beats manually checking two separate schedules.

What’s New Beyond the Rebrands

A combined trophy debuts in 2026, rewarding whichever franchise performs best across both the men’s and women’s tables collectively, on top of the existing separate men’s and women’s titles. It’s a small structural change but a meaningful one for a tournament that’s always tried to present its two competitions as genuinely equal billing rather than a men’s event with a women’s undercard.

The salary cap has also risen with the new investment, up to £2.05 million for men’s squads and £880,000 for women’s squads, reflecting the wider budgets the new ownership groups are working with. The overseas player quota increased too, from three to four per squad, which shows up clearly in this year’s auction results with a noticeably more international look to several rosters.

The auction itself, held over two days in March at a London venue, was reported as English cricket’s first major sporting auction in the IPL style, a format shift that matches the broader Indian investment theme running through the season.

Following the Tournament Beyond Live Coverage

If Sky Sports isn’t part of your setup and you’re not planning to add it just for five weeks of cricket, BBC Sounds covers every single match with ball-by-ball radio commentary, which is a genuinely solid way to follow a tournament built around short, fast innings that don’t always need visuals to be gripping. BBC Sport’s website and app carry live text commentary and daily highlights packages regardless of whether a match got the BBC Two slot.

For the knockout stages specifically, the Eliminator on 14 August and the double final on 16 August, checking which of those fall into the BBC’s confirmed 16 is worth doing early, since finals day traditionally gets prioritised for free-to-air coverage even in years when the regular season split favours Sky more heavily.

Where The Hundred Sits in England’s Cricket Summer

Worth placing this in context, because The Hundred doesn’t run in isolation. It sits inside a genuinely packed English cricket calendar, and knowing what surrounds it helps explain some of the broadcast decisions.

England’s men’s and women’s international fixtures typically wind down or pause around the domestic tournament window, since a chunk of England’s contracted players are drafted into Hundred squads rather than touring. That overlap is deliberate scheduling by the ECB, designed to put the country’s biggest domestic product front and centre for a five-week stretch without competing against international cricket for the same viewers.

Sky Sports holds broadcasting rights across most of England’s home international cricket too, which is part of why the same channel carrying The Hundred also tends to be the one carrying Test matches and ODIs either side of the tournament window. If your household is already set up to watch Sky Sports Cricket for one, the same access covers the other without any additional setup.

The BBC’s radio commitment through Test Match Special has run continuously through English cricket seasons for decades, and that tradition carries into The Hundred too via BBC Sounds. If you’re the kind of cricket fan who grew up with radio commentary as the primary way of following a match rather than television, that continuity is worth knowing about even with a Sky subscription sitting there as an option.

A Quick Note on Ticket Demand and Viewing Figures

The rebrand and fresh investment have generated more pre-season attention than the tournament’s had in a couple of years, and early ticket sales reporting for the opening rounds reflected that, with several venues reporting stronger advance sales than the equivalent point in the 2025 season. Whether that translates into a genuine ratings bump on Sky remains to be seen once the tournament’s actually underway, but the narrative hook, familiar English grounds fielding teams with IPL-branded brains and money behind them, gives casual viewers a reason to tune in that a straight name-for-name rebrand alone wouldn’t.

For households deciding whether the tournament is worth prioritising over a five-week stretch of already-busy summer television, that fresh storyline is probably the single best argument for giving at least the opening weekend a look, even if cricket isn’t usually appointment viewing in your house.

The women’s tournament in particular has grown its own following separate from the men’s competition over the past few seasons, and the ECB’s push for a combined trophy this year is partly aimed at cementing that as a permanent fixture of how the tournament is watched and talked about, rather than treating the women’s games as a secondary attraction squeezed around the men’s schedule.

Getting Familiar With the Rebranded Rosters

If you followed the tournament under the old names, it’s worth a quick recalibration before the opening weekend rather than being confused mid-match about why a commentator keeps saying “MI London” when you’re expecting Oval Invincibles. The playing squads themselves haven’t been wiped and rebuilt from scratch, most of the core players who won titles under the old identities are still on the books, it’s the ownership structure and branding that changed, not the entire roster.

MI London carry the strongest recent pedigree into the new identity, having won three consecutive men’s titles as Oval Invincibles before the rebrand, with captain Sam Curran remaining at the helm. Sunrisers Leeds inherit the women’s defending champions tag from their Northern Superchargers days, with the squad that won in 2025 largely intact under the new name and colours. Manchester Super Giants have the most rebuilding to do of the three rebranded sides, having missed the knockouts as Manchester Originals last year, so the new investment arrives alongside genuine pressure to show improvement on the pitch rather than just on the balance sheet.

For fantasy league players or anyone tracking the auction results from March, double-checking a player’s current team name against the 2026 rosters specifically is worth the two minutes it takes, since several fixture apps and third-party cricket sites were still showing pre-rebrand team names in their databases weeks into the new season.

If your Sky Sports household includes anyone who follows both competitions closely, it’s worth building the EPG favourites around both tables from the start rather than defaulting to men’s fixtures only, since the double-header format means the women’s match is happening at the same venue on the same day regardless.