One way of getting around this is to adjust and enforce your company’s IT Policy, specifically the sites that employees are allowed to visit. By blocking the main video streaming websites so employees will not be able stream content, however this runs the risk of employees then finding obscure free streaming sites which may have viruses or spyware. While this option does eradicate most of the problem, you may then be left with a bunch of disgruntled employees who may then decide to just not come in to work on the day of the match.

An alternative would be have a television in the office to screen important matches (such as England matches). This will enable employees to continue working, keep up to date with the games and will improve the sense of moral in your office. The other added benefit is that people who do not want to watch the match can carry on with their work without having to worry about bandwidth and network issues.
Let us know if your company doing anything for employees during the World Cup. It would be great to hear any innovative ideas.

Ignoring the cost of about £12 to watch the game, my main concern will be picture quality. Having watched football games on my PC broadcast through a 7″ window (picture quality degrades significantly when switched to full screen mode), I can confirm it is a very underwhelming experience. There is the 30 second or so lag to deal with, the poor commentary and then you have to try and identify the players through the low quality feed.

IPTV is the future. But until faster broadband speeds are made available and affordable to all home users, live streaming of mainstream programmes will remain a mediocre experience.

Approx 500, 000 people watched the game live on Saturday compared to an average 4 million+ for normal England games.

Question is would the ISPs and broadcasters have coped if 4million people had subscribed to watch the game?