BBC Online’s World Cup coverage

Scary faces logo I never promised not to blog about football.

Which was a stroke of luck, as I feel inclined to mention the Beeb’s online coverage of the World Cup. Streaming games (legally) online is a ground-breaking move indeed.

It’s something millions of office workers - myself included - will find genuinely useful and adds value for their licence fee money.

The Beeb - along with ITV - spent �160m on World Cup broadcasting rights for this and the last World Cup. This is compared to just �3.35m paid for France 1998, as the University of Leicester details:

“The British deal with Kirchmedia, was finalised in October 2001 after almost a year of discussions. These became quite heated. Kirchmedia wanted �170 million for British rights to cover World Cup 2002 only. However, there was no real scope for a market for a rights auction in the UK because British legislation means that the World Cup finals must be shown on terrestrial TV in the UK. As the BBC and ITV decided to negotiate with Kirch together - and with the satellite and cable companies effectively out of the picture - Kirch was in a difficult spot. In the first round of negotiations, �55 million was offered by ITV and the BBC for rights to World Cup 2002. In the end an overall price of �160 million was agreed for the rights to show both the 2002 and 2006 World Cups.”

As a footnote, Kirchmedia went bust in early 2002.

The BBC’s online coverage will apparently include every group stage game, the second round, quarter finals and anything else they bought TV rights to. Four-minute highlight clips from every game will also go online.

To test the water, yesterday evening I watched the opening game, Germany versus Costa Rica, in a tiny browser window. When people ran, the video gave them an ashy trail like that of a slug, or something out of Donnie Darko.

Still, I could track the bizarre bending ball for Germany’s fourth goal and I could even tell that Paulo Wanchope wasn’t offside for his first goal - just: