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With The World Cup, TV Everywhere Has Finally Arrived

This article is more than 9 years old.

Thanks to the World Cup, millions of people will never watch TV the same way again. Literally.

As a cable television subscriber for the past two years, I knew I could stream ESPN to my iPad or phone through its authenticated app, WatchESPN. But I never got around to actually downloading the app, basically because I never felt the need. After trying to get by on crappy pirate streams for the first World Cup match, I bit the bullet.

I thought I might not be unique in this regard, so I asked ESPN for the numbers. They're eye-popping: In the two weeks since the tournament started, there have been 2.6 million downloads of the app. That's almost twice as many downloads as ESPN has recorded in any full month previously.

Yesterday's match between the U.S. and Germany represented a new high-water mark for the app, with a total audience of 3.2 million unique viewers and an average audience of 1.05 million viewers per minute. Demand was so much higher than for any previous event that ESPN blamed it for some of the crashes users experienced.

Clint Dempsey and Belgium's Marouane Fellaini. (Photo credit: Erik Daniel Drost)

The crash aside, there are an awful lot of people now getting their first taste of the ease and convenience of TV everywhere, as authenticated app streaming is known. With yesterday's simultaneous matches, both of which needed to fall just so for the U.S. team to go through to the knockout rounds, it was almost as if FIFA had colluded with ESPN to ensure even viewers who were able to get to a TV during the workday would have a good reason to stream as well.

For the entire tournament to date, ESPN says it's averaging 737,000 unique viewers per match within the app.

Of course, there's no way of knowing just how many of those streamers are cord-cutters logging in with someone else's password. Is the World Cup to WatchESPN as "Game of Thrones" is to HBO Go?