The billions of fans of the soccer World Cup, the planet’s top sporting event, will increasingly turn to mobile phones to track the action, according to a Nielsen survey released Thursday.
Over half the 27,000 people surveyed in 55 countries plan to follow the tournament, beginning in South Africa on June 11, Nielsen said. Twenty-one per cent said they would get information about the tournament on their mobile device and nine per cent said they would download an application to track the action.
“This event is the biggest in the world of sports by far,” Roger Entner, Nielsen’s senior vice-president for mobile insights, said. “In 2010, the mobile is really starting to be a medium for soccer fans worldwide to connect with the game.”
The popular FIFA tournament drew over 700 million TV viewers when it was last played in 2006. While this is the first such Nielsen survey, Mr Entner said the numbers using cellphones to follow the event will be far higher than 2006. “The last World Cup, there was no iPhone,” he said of Apple’s popular smartphone introduced in 2007. With more powerful, faster devices and networks, those growth trends will only continue with widespread mobile video and TV being the next step, Mr Entner said.
Of those surveyed, 51 per cent said they intend to follow the tournament, including 84 per cent in Brazil, 83 per cent in Argentina, 75 per cent in Italy and Portugal and almost two-thirds of the people in China, Nielsen said.
“People intend to use mobile to supplement their hunger for information about the game,” Mr Entner said.
“If you can’t watch the game live, you’re going to follow it through your mobile device.”
Thirty-four per cent of those surveyed picked Brazil as the likely Cup winner, easily outdistancing Argentina, England and Germany. —Reuters