Actually, as a complete non-soccer fan, I will be doing everything I can to avoid the coverage, which I expect will be non-stop. A whole month of hype? As movie mogul Sam Goldwyn once said "Include me out!"

But this will be front and centre over much of the TV and radio news for the next month, so it will be almost impossible to ignore (although I'll certainly try!) If CTV gets exclusive rights to all live action video, that will be a coup for the network. And the rest will be left struggling to cover a major world event taking place in their own city.

There are only so many sidebars you can do on tourist reaction, the crowds and congestion, all of which will undoubtedly be coming your way starting later this week. 

I will have a casual interest in how the Canadian team performs. Will I actually watch a game? zero chance of that happening. There will still be MLB and CFL Football to keep me entertained.

mace wrote:

I will have a casual interest in how the Canadian team performs. Will I actually watch a game? zero chance of that happening. There will still be MLB and CFL Football to keep me entertained.

Me to.
But, what I liked about FIFA on tsn radio was the pregame commentary and the commentary, and just seaing canada in a world cup in there home country.
I could'nt tell you who any of the players were, I don't watch soccer.
I only listen to the world cup to hear the commentary and how each country is doing at soccer and hear about how each country is acomidating the big game.

RadioActive wrote:

It  looks like the same restrictions apply to the World Cup as they do to the Olympics. Non-rights holders can only show stills of the game during their newscasts, which makes it hard to appreciate what really happened. 

I just noticed that NBC Nightly News IS showing highlights from some of the games, which didn't make sense because Fox has the rights in the U.S. and I haven't seen them anywhere else. 

But then I realized NBC-owned Telemundo has the Spanish language rights, so there must be an exception for its sister network to use some of the action. 

paterson1 wrote:

CHCH has been showing highlights on their newscasts.  They also did during the last Olympics.  Don't know how they manage this.  The highlights I saw on Monday gave credit to TSN. 

I admit not knowing what the situation is with FIFA, but the IOC was extremely strict with any Olympic highlights for non-rights holder. I've told the story here before about how my TV station put up a Games recap story on our website.

We thought we removed everything that could get us in trouble, but there was a flash - literally 2 secs. or less of footage - and we got an almost immediate email from the IOC telling us to take it down immediately or face legal consequences. 

So of course we did. Clearly, it was an accident, which I'm sure they realized, but they could not let anything go that might set a precedent. So it was taken offline temporarily and the offending 2 seconds of footage was removed. 

My guess is CHCH simply got lost in the crowd. I strongly supect there is no way they can legally run any highlights at all. But maybe they're too small for FIFA to have noticed. Giving a "courtesy TSN" key is not enough. They're likely not supposed to be showing anything but stills. They're very lucky they got away with it. 

I checked the evening news on CHCH tonight and they had photos of the FIFA highlights like other stations, no video. I always meant to post during the last Olympics when they were showing video highlights but didn't get around to it and more or less forgot.