Guardian website:

Football fans will be able to watch highlights of the World Cup on the internet following a last minute u-turn by Fifa and the broadcast rights holders to the tournament.

KirchSportAG, the Germany-based company created to hold the rights after parent company Kirch collapsed last month, originally refused to make the rights available to Yahoo!, which is producing the official website.

In Europe most matches will kick off in the morning, which is expected to make millions of office-bound football fans turn to the web to keep up with the latest scores in Japan and South Korea.

The official Yahoo! site, fifaworldcup.com, which is expected to become the most visited site of all time during the finals, will now be allowed to show four minutes of highlights of each match.

However, fans will be expected to pay for the privilege with Yahoo! charging $19.95 to join its 'Fifa VIP Club' for the duration of the finals, for which they will receive the highlights and other exclusive content.

"This first time distribution of Fifa World Cup video highlights on the internet represents a progressive approach on behalf of Fifa and KirchSport," said Jerry Yang, the co-founder and chief executive of Yahoo!.

"These video highlights will serve as a cornerstone of fifaworldcup.com's extensive offering for millions of passionate football fans - no matter their time zone or country," he added.

As well as providing brief highlights of each match as it finishes, with commentary in six languages, the site will also feature documentary footage telling the story of the last 10 World Cups and a searchable archive of all the action.

Fifa was initially nervous about allowing highlights to be streamed on the web for fear of upsetting its lucrative broadcasting partners.

But having shelled out £10m to build the site and become an official sponsor, Yahoo! has been lobbying hard to include video-style footage on the site.

The president of Fifa, Joseph Blatter, said he was pleased the deal had been done "in a complementary fashion that respects the role of our broadcast partners".

-- Anonymous, April 29, 2002

Answers

No doubt Yahoo will be incorporating the latest hi-tech features from the Metro matchday audio webcast...

-- Anonymous, April 29, 2002

So I take it this means another World Cup without live webcasting of the match. :-(( I really don't understand why broadcasters are so worried about internet webcasting. If people have access to radio or television coverage, they going to choose that over the web due to higher quality and ease of access.

I'd pay the 19.95 if I could listen to the webcasts of all matches, in their entirety, plus get to see highlights. Not paying it just to watch a postage stamp sized screen of blurry little stop-start images, when all/most matches are being broadcast free on telly for the cost of a few video tapes and a few minutes programming the vcr. And the cost of my nerves trying to avoid results all day as I can't come in late to work every day. As it is, I may well have to be responsible (ptah!) and only choose 1 England, 1 Ireland and 1 US game to pull my sickies for. At least in the first round. ;-)

So don't expect to see me on the bbs much during the first 3 weeks of June! ;-)

-- Anonymous, April 29, 2002

FIFA president Fanny Blatter said he was open to bribes or gifts for future tournaments pleased - etc

-- Anonymous, April 29, 2002