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A Cord Cutter’s Strategy for Watching the World Cup on TV

June 13, 2014

Watching World Cup without Cable TV subscription

By Cynthia Herbert :: 1:39 PM

If you’re one of the roughly 7 million households in the U.S. that has cut the cord from cable television over the past couple of years, you probably don’t miss it much. Except for watching live sports. And, if you’re a soccer fan, you’re probably missing that cable cord a whole lot right now.

While it is a bit difficult for non-pay television subscribers to get access to the latest matches from the World Cup in Brazil, it isn’t impossible, and just requires some patience and tolerance for languages other than English.

Although World Cup coverage in widely available across the rest of the globe, here in the United States, the broadcast rights are owned by Disney, as they were in 2010 as well. The company plans to show this year’s matches on ESPN (43 games), ESPN2 (11 games), and ABC (10 games). Without entering a password and authenticating from your pay television provider, watching the live streams via these network websites is not allowed.

However, if you can put up with Spanish speaking announcers instead of English speaking ones, then Univision network might just be your savior.  The Spanish-speaking network also has the Spanish-language broadcasting rights to the World Up games, and will be streaming all of the matches online, without requiring a pay-TV login.

Watching the games on Univision was a popular option during the 2010 matches, as the network had about twice as many viewers as ESPN did during the earlier games.

If watching the games on Univision isn’t your cup of tea, then you may want to consider using a VPN. With a VPN, you can often spoof your location to one that is outside of the US – like in Europe, South America, or Canada. With a different location, you will be more likely to bypass the filters on foreign content websites, and be allowed to watch some of the matches for free. Popular VPN sites include Hola and UnoTelly.

With a little perseverance, cord cutters too will be shouting “GOOOAL” in real time as their teams advance in the matches.

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