World Cup Internet Coverage

As a football fan, my main online resource for everything football has always been ESPN’s Soccernet Website, then the BBC, then Sky - in that order. The issue with the makeup of the Premiership is that none of the live games are available any more on ’terrestrial’ television - and Sky isn’t a particularly cost-effective option for following your team (as only some of the games are covered live); so mostly I catch up watching Internet highlights and BBC’s Match of the Day.

With the World Cup, the television coverage is completely different. The majority of the games are televised live on ITV, with the remainder broadcast on the BBC. As I am actively working for most of the time that the games are on, my main points of access are the ITV Live Website and iPhone App, as well as the BBC iPlayer Live webcasts (all playing in background of course).

As the principal broadcaster for this World Cup, ITV has really pushed the boat out when creating their World Cub mini-site. A number of Live Stats panels give you regular, in-context updates - at least they are supposed to! The ITV Live site is obviously superior to the BBC one, although its Live Steaming service is much much worse. Watching ITV Live means frequent loss of broadcast, with numerous glitches on video feed, audio and stats display. The BBC’s effort is a more minimalist affair, but the quality of broadcast service is much higher; so that even though ITV has the nicer viewing environment, the experience ends up much inferior to the BBC. I also don’t understand why the BBC could not implement a nice contrasting black background for their World Cup Live framework. You may have read in other articles on this site, how video is best supported by a black ’cinema-like’ framework.

So the ITV Live Website is a good effort, but not really good enough overall. Also, Soccernet offers much better statistical updates and presents more information in a much more interactive and appealing manner. US sports coverage has always been about feeding through as many different statistics as possible at any given point in time, and Soccernet really excels at this - I love summarised statistical data.

Of course there is a whole slew of Apple iPhone Apps for the World Cup - an even mix between free and paid-for ones. Nearly every newspaper has its own World Cup App, and most are being charged for. I downloaded free ITV and ESPN World Cup Apps. For my purposes, the ESPN App comes up trumps again - offering a far higher degree of ’content’ and statistics than any of the alternatives. The ITV App is quite half-baked really, apart from the Live stream, which peculiarly is better on the iPhone than on the Internet!

So my Recommendations for Web Citizens is to catch ITV games on your iPhone, and BBC games on the BBC Website! I’d be interested to hear what websites and technologies other football fans are making use of! Let’s see some comments ...