trying to find the World Cup live in virtual China

Update 6/11: try this.  Go to SMGBB’s World Cup Live site and click on the yellow button that looks like this, which is found in the middle of the Live Channel screen.

It will provide you with a link to the software that will allow you to see the games live, which is provided by Mysee.  Click on the blue button.  I can’t download it since I have an Apple computer and it’s only available for PCs.  So it’s up to you…but give it a try and let us know if it works!

[original post, 5/31] As tech-savvy football/soccer fans from around the world know, you can find some sporting events broadcast online via downloadable P2P apps (previously blogged here).  Here’s a first attempt to figure out how this will work for the 2006 World Cup.  Will official Chinese sites show video highlights only?  Will others be watching real-time live feeds broadcast peer to peer? For their part, FIFA and Yahoo are offering free online video highlights
available within the hour following the final whistle of each game
(NOTE: except Asia and Middle East, where a 24-hour delay is in place).  There will clearly be a demand during that 24 delay, and it will clearly be met.

Sohu.com and SMGBB.cn, a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, have
partnered to provide the online 2006 FIFA World Cup for tens of
millions of Chinese viewers, if not more. Sohu is also the exclusive online media provider of the Beijing 2008
Olympics (talk about a good place to be), and the 2006 World Cup can be
seen as an early dry-run.

Sohu has its so-called “direct feed”  schedule here.  Probably available here, on Sohu’s 2006 World Cup homepage. Meanwhile, SMGBB.cn has its own World Cup page, where you can clearly see the “Live Channel” screen where streams/highlights might be coming. It requires the latest Internet Explorer upgrade.  SMGBB also has this page which seems even more promising but which also requires you to register.  I’m still trying…

By the way, as a measure of how important the World Cup broadcast is in China, 7 out of 10 Chinese report plans to watch it, and it has even been the site of a major, if bizarre, political protest. During the last 2002 World Cup TV broadcasts in China, the SINOSAT satellite feed was hijacked on and off for ten different stations across China over a period of a week. It sounds like something off of Lost–screens flickering, blurry images of Falun Gong literature appearing…Read more here.

From Sohu’s site, this press release:

http://2006.sohu.com/smgbb [will deliver] real-time video highlights
and tournament photos directly to football fans in China. The channel
will feature exclusive World Cup 2006 content including event
highlights, select clips, behind the scene footage in all the 64
tournaments and comprehensive reports – all readily available online
through rich media formats.