So another World Cup is over. 64 games broadcast around the world. And with games being played at various times throughout the working day, this meant alternative ways were required to view them. First up for me was streaming online. I watched a number of games whilst in the office, and my experience was pretty good. I can probably count on one hand the number of times the stream buffered for the opening game, while I have no complaints over the quality of viewing. I particularly liked the BBC coverage, providing short clips of important action I missed while involved on a conference call! I did manage to see the England v Slovenia game on television, so was not one of the record-breaking 800,000 concurrent streams, but having spoken to several people who were unfortunate (or fortunate) not to be able to get out of the office, the experience sounds somewhat mixed in terms of quality. For one week of the World Cup I was over in the US benchmarking a number of mobile video solutions – one of which happened to be Sprint TV on the new HTC Evo (its large 4.3” display and fold out stand make this a great device for consuming video content). I was very impressed with ESPN Mobile’s coverage of the World Cup. Aside from a few glitches (e.g. temporarily showing the commentary for Nigeria v South Korea but pictures from Argentina v Greece), it was easy to follow the game. The picture was about 7 seconds behind television coverage, but I don’t remember a single instance of buffering – and I wasn’t even in one of Sprint’s few areas of WIMAX coverage. So while congratulations go to Spain for winning the World Cup, I must also say congratulations to those who made the World Cup a successful experience viewing over multiple screens. - Paul Brown ESPN coverage on the HTC Evo