World Cup Effect

Just eleven days left for the opening of one the biggest sports events in the world, in Brazil the things are moving very fast, it’s impressive how the football (soccer) works as a catalyzer of businesses down here.
For example, I was reading some statistics of how well is the sales of Plasma and LCD TVs, and it’s impressive to say that in the first trimester of 2006 the electronic industry sold more of these TV sets than in the whole year of 2005. The euphoria is everywhere, Nike never sold this much of official T-shirts of the Brazilian squad, the sales of travel packages to go to Germany surpass 60.000, and the Internet market in Brazil is on fire.

Terra (Telefonica Spain), UOL, MSN, Yahoo and Globo.com are the main web portals fighting for the attention and eyeballs of thousands of virtual visitors. The big difference this time is how Internet video is becoming the most noticed differentiation for all of them. Every news portal has tons of video interviews, analysis, highlights and much more, following the tendency you already see on US and UK news portals.

But the big thing is that for the first time in Brazil one of these portals, Globo. com, (which I work for) will broadcast all the 64 matches live on the Internet. This is big because we’ve never had this kind of live covered in Latin America.

And why is the live broadcast of the matches on Internet that important? This World Cup is pretty different from the others, mainly because of the time zone (Germany is 5 hours ahead) so the matches will take place in the commercial time, the viewers have no option to watch the competition other than the Internet. And the main expected audience is not for the Brazilian matches, which certainly everyone will find a way to watch on TV, but the other teams games. On top of this you will be able to get access to full length matches on demand, so you can see whatever, whenever and how many times you want the entire competition, it’s heaven for the football fanatics.

The main focus of ISPs, Telecom and Media companies are to lure the attention of the broadband users to make them desire new products, to upgrade their connection speeds and to acquire more services. In the last few months the broadband market has been in a price war and offering new larger pipelines, all Telecom companies are offering 2Mbps, 4Mbps and 8Mbps broadband connections for a very reasonable price, US$35 , US$ 45 and US$80 respectively, and when this users get this kind of connection, it makes the media/content companies and the ISPs to produce more high quality content, this is certainly more noticeable when we are talking about video, creating a virtuous circle.

I don’t know how it is the expectation about this World Cup around the world, but I think in Europe it is going to be a big event too. England has a great team, Germany is at home, France, Portugal and Italy has great players, Spain, Croatia, Holland, and the others are going to perform a great show for all of us.

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