The FIFA 2010 World Cup will be viewed like never before

Yesterday the 22nd of April, South Africa went to the polls and the world was watching. The elections ran relatively smoothly which bodes well for a peaceful presidential transition that will ensure political stability ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Now we can look forward to unprecedented numbers watching the World Cup in South Africa thanks to the new age technology that is being set up for this showpiece.

FIFA expects a record audience to view the 2010 World Cup in South Africa – much more than the impressive 26,29 billion cumulative audience for Germany. Surprise- surprise! Of course it would do the cause a world of good if the more highly populated countries like China qualify. Unfortunately India will definitely not qualify. Plans have been made to get more Africans watching since we will be the hosts. For example, in Nigeria FIFA has arranged that every single TV channel will televise the matches. There’ll be no escaping the beautiful game there.

Since we have our critics around the world, a lot will also depend on the success of the FIFA Confederations Cup, the World Cup dress rehearsal. The media and critics will not allow mistakes. The impression we create will last for the world cup. We cannot afford to make any major bloopers otherwise the world media will crucify us.

The nerve centre of our broadcasting effort will be Johannesburg’s hosting of the FIFA 2010 World Cup International Broadcast Centre (IBC). The IBC will be the hub of state-of-the-art hub broadcast hub of the World Cup and it will be the rest of the world’s link to the showpiece. To give you and idea of the scale of this broadcast, FIFA will be spending R1, 5 billion on TV production for the tournament. More importantly the 2010 IBC will help South Africa to advance to a new model of high definition TV and new broadcast technology. This telecommunications infrastructure will create a legacy far beyond the event for the country. Furthermore, Johannesburg hosting the IBC will lead to a direct spending in excess of R340 million with about 3000 jobs being created in the city.

It doesn’t end there – FIFA is also expecting unprecedented coverage of the World Cup on mobile phones, thanks to new technology that now allows high quality, high definition, visuals on mobiles. With the kind of technology available on mobiles these people will be able to watch an entire match live and it will be great. The technology has been tested and it is impressive. The picture will be a bit more compressed than the images on a normal TV screen but the system has been designed specifically for mobiles.

The only minus is that the South African Broadcasting Corporation has no plans to broadcast the 2010 FIFA World Cup in high definition for its South African viewers. However, South African pay-TV broadcaster Multichoice’s subscribers and Swiss based Host Broadcasting Services will broadcast the games in HD for other countries. The problem is that the majority of South Africans would need to acquire a digital set-top-box in order to view the HD content, and since HD adoption is low in the country it is simply not a priority.

That aside, an unprecedented global audience will view the entire World Cup in crystalline clear HD images from not-so-dark Africa.