The streaming of England v Ukraine world cup qualifier has been judged as a streaming success after around 500,000 viewers tuned in.

Perform, the internet broadcaster who showed the football (soccer) match after no offers came in from standard tv broadcasters revealed that in an after match questionaire, 9 out of 10 viewers said that the picture quality was ok to good.

The first of its kind stream is seen by many as a glimpse into the future, but by many more as a step into the past. Callers to radio stations have said that there were glitches in the stream, delays in commentary and even loss of picture entirely.

Prior to the match, Perform had said it would cap the number of streams at one million to preserve the quality of the picture. The actual number of paying viewers who paid between £4.99-£11.99 was estimated at around 250000-300000, although many came from a marketing deal with the online bookmaker Bet365, who streamed the game free to all customers with an account.

It was estimated though that had the game been on terrestial tv it would have had around 7 million watching. Kentaro did not give any detailed figures, citing the figures are commercially sensitive, so it is impossible to assess how many viewers arrived via newspaper websites and other media partners signed up to promote the match on an affiliate deal.

Andrew Croker, chairman of Perform said:- “it was an extremely successful and ground breaking project”.

He added: “From a customer-service, production and distribution point of view, we felt it went very smoothly.” According to its own survey, 87% of viewers said the match offered value for money and 89% said they would pay to watch sports online again.

The BBC, which struck a last minute deal for highlights but was not allowed to reveal this until after the match had finished as Kentaro tried to maximise subscription revenue, attracted a peak audience of 4.3m. The corporation had bid in excess of £1m for the live rights but Kentaro, which was believed to be seeking around £3m, deemed it too low and opted to pursue an internet only broadcast instead.

Philipp Grothe, chief exec of Kentaro said the model is likely to be replicated in future. “Not only have we delivered Britain’s largest ever live pay per view internet sports audience but commercially the venture has proved itself as a viable model for future games,” he said.The experiment was being closely watched by rights holders globally, keen to see whether it can prove a viable alternative to selling to a TV broadcaster and so help stoke competition in the market.

So will all major sports events be shown online? Hardly, the quality and performance was below par and the number of complaints were high. It did however prove that once the streaming speeds are sorted out and have a greater capacity then watching internet tv on a big screen is a saleable commodity.

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