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World Cup highlights to go online

Germany take on England, but what would it look like on the Web?

ZURICH, Switzerland -- Highlights of World Cup matches will be available on subscription via the Internet, football's world governing body FIFA has announced.

Fans will be charged $19.95 to see the action via the tournament's official Web site www.fifaworldcup.com, which is being produced with Yahoo!, FIFA said from its Zurich headquarters on Monday.

The deal was struck with German media firm Kirch, which owns the World Cup broadcast rights for television and the Internet. FIFA has not said how much the agreement is worth, the Associated Press reported.

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The $19.95 price will buy four minutes of action from each of the 64 matches, commentary in six languages, post-match interviews, screensavers and competitions, said AP. FIFA hopes to have the action online within three hours of the end of the game.

"FIFA has moved decisively into the new communications era," said FIFA President Sepp Blatter, whose job is being challenged by Issa Hayatou from Cameroon in a vote before the finals in Japan and South Korea kick off on May 31.

"This is particularly significant for fans in different time zones to Korea and Japan. For example Europe is up to nine hours behind. By launching this video highlights package FIFA has listened to the voices of football fans across the globe and has responded by providing the ultimate way to stay in touch with the action."

Yahoo! is confident that the subscription model is sound business. "We've always known that this would be the Internet World Cup, partly because of the timing of the games," Lindsay Biggart, Yahoo!'s UK marketing director, told The Times newspaper in London earlier this year.

"Our audience is predominantly 16 to 34-year-old upmarket males. There are 15.5 million in the UK and a third go to Yahoo! on a regular basis. Advertising money will follow.''

And Oliver Butler, the editor of Soccer Investor, told CNN the Internet was the way forward for sporting events. "You may see within five years' time, rather than TV deals, Internet deals are the big main provider of revenue -- for clubs as well."

But Theresa Wise, media analyst at Accenture, warned: "There's a big challenge as to how to make money out of it. Advertising revenues on the Internet have gone south, and clearly if it's only a narrowband video experience, you can't really charge subscription for it either."