This year’s FIFA World Cup was the most watched sporting event in history, but not everyone had equal access to it. Funding challenges facing broadcasters, particularly public service broadcasting, have been a growing concern globally, and FIFA 2026 brought those tensions into sharp relief.
The ability of public service broadcasters to secure major sports rights has been in decline for some time, driven by escalating rights fees and fierce competition. For audiences who cannot afford pay-TV subscriptions or match passes, this has increasingly meant being locked out of live coverage of the world’s most-watched sporting event.
When major sports events are broadcast over-the-air, audiences can access coverage at high quality regardless of their broadband capacity or the number of viewers simultaneously accessing the service. Streaming services, by contrast, struggle to resource adequately for high-demand events, often leading to a scaling down of quality profiles during peak viewing periods.
The distribution of broadcast services, particularly public service media in an increasingly online-only environment, remains a hot topic across many countries.
The 2026 World Cup comprised 104 matches, running from June 11 June to July 19 when the final was played. Broadcasters around the world carried the matches across their multi-platform distribution networks.
In New Zealand, national public broadcaster TVNZ held the broadcast rights, giving New Zealand residents the option to purchase a match pass for access to all matches, both live and on catch-up via the TVNZ+ online platform. Selected matches, including those featuring the New Zealand team, were also carried on free-to-access (FTA) digital terrestrial television (DTT). The opening ceremony and final were broadcast on TVNZ’s DTT service in high definition.
In the UK, the BBC distributed coverage to British audiences across its full suite of platforms. According to the BBC, audiences turned to it not just for live matches, but for the analysis, storytelling, and shared moments that brought the nation together.
The reach of BBC coverage across television, iPlayer, BBC Sounds, the BBC Sport website, app and social channels reflects the enduring power of major sporting events to create shared experiences at remarkable scale.
The BBC reported that its second-screen 3D experience was used 192,000 times during the England versus Argentina match, with more than 2.8 million Ultra HD (UHD) streams of the match on iPlayer and a record-breaking 1.8 million concurrent UHD streams. Some mobile networks transported over 1,000 terabytes of data during the match, marking a new record and the first time those networks have exceeded the 1,000-terabyte threshold at peak usage.
Previously, we examined the funding challenges facing streaming services, particularly in the UK, where the debate has been ongoing for some time. The UK is among a small number of countries that enforce a television license fee, and resistance to it has grown, with many British residents claiming they no longer watch or listen to the BBC and therefore declining to pay.
Culture Minister Lisa Nandy has indicated that expanding the licence fee to cover platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ is among the options being considered as part of the BBC’s Royal Charter renewal process.
The minister also made clear the government’s broader commitment to the BBC, stating, “There is a shared belief across government, including the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, that the BBC is one of the most important institutions in this country, alongside the National Health Service (NHS).
“If the NHS is responsible for the health of our people, I think the BBC is responsible for the health of our democracy and our nation.”
The minister also ruled out a levy on streamers, a model used in other countries, warning that such a tax would deter investment and harm the UK’s broader broadcasting ecosystem, including the BBC.
Other countries have taken different approaches to funding public media. New Zealand, for instance, has no a licence fee, with public broadcasting funded through general tax revenue. Public broadcasters such as TVNZ operate as public companies and pay dividends to the New Zealand Treasury for the use of publicly owned assets while paying appropriate taxes as any other company.
Across all models, however, the challenge remains the same: striking a delicate balance between incentivising investment and ensuring that streamers and public service media operate under sufficiently similar rules to maintain a level playing field.
The New Zealand football team’s opening FIFA World Cup match against Iran, which ended in a 2-2 draw, delivered record streaming numbers for TVNZ+, according to Radio New Zealand reports.
The June 16 fixture made it TVNZ+’s largest streaming day ever, with almost 2.3 million streams across the 24-hour period. The match generated 555,000 streams on the platform, while a further 465,000 viewers watched on free-to-air DTT channel TVNZ1, placing it among the top five highest-rated football matches on broadcast television in New Zealand since 2010.
TVNZ+ streamed all matches available to New Zealanders viewers through a purchased pass. Jodi O’Donnell, TVNZ CEO, said the pay model enables the broadcaster to compete more effectively for sports rights and serve audiences in the ways they choose to watch.
“Whether it’s every moment live, or free-to-air on TVNZ channels,” she said, the approach gives TVNZ the commercial flexibility to acquire and distribute major sports content more sustainably.
Across the tournament, TVNZ offered a mix of free-to-air coverage and a premium digital pass — 22 matches were broadcast free-to-air, with 11 on TVNZ1, including every New Zealand game, and an additional 11 on TVNZ+. All 104 matches were available live and on-demand via a one-off TVNZ+ event pass at NZ$44.95 (US$26.55). For a public service broadcaster navigating the increasingly difficult economics of premium sports rights, it was a notable achievement.
According to Global Statistics, broadcast rights for the FIFA World Cup 2026 was sold across more than 175 territories worldwide, generating a projected US$3.92 billion in rights revenue, making this the highest-grossing broadcast deal in the history of any single sporting event.
What makes the 2026 rights landscape commercially extraordinary, Global Statistics notes, is the convergence of geography, format, and market size happening simultaneously for the first time. With the tournament staged across North America, European broadcasters — representing some of the world’s most lucrative television markets — are watching matches in their own primetime evening windows rather than the early-morning or late-night slots that Qatar 2022 demanded.
According to Nielsen and TVNZ+ data, the FIFA World Cup 2026 was the biggest event in TVNZ+’s history, with over 20 million streams recorded across all 104 matches. TVNZ has already secured free-to-view and pay rights for the FIFA World Cup 2030, bringing the tournament back to New Zealand audiences.
In the United States, the tournament delivered record-breaking viewership across television and streaming platforms from the opening match through to the final, making it the most-watched FIFA World Cup ever on US television and reaffirming the enduring power of live sports to capture mass audiences.
According to Worlddata, the 39-day, 104-match, 48-team tournament across 16 host cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada broke US television records almost every week it aired. Axis Intelligence Research describes it as the most-watched sporting event in US television history for a non-NFL broadcast, and almost certainly the most-watched World Cup globally since records began.
The US-Belgium Round drew 33.09 million viewers on Fox alone, peaking at 41.03 million — the largest single-network audience for any non-NFL sport since Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. The group stage averaged 5.05 million viewers across Fox, FS1, and Tubi, up 92% from 2022.
Globally, FIFA projected approximately six billion engagements across broadcast, streaming, digital, and out-of-home viewing for the full tournament, compared to five billion for the 2022 Qatar World Cup, whose final alone reached 1.42 billion viewers. The opening weekend of FIFA 2026 already put the global audience above one billion in overnight estimates.
Axis Intelligence Research reported that FIFA’s official broadcast communiqué confirmed that over 50 million viewers watched World Cup action across all three host nations during the opening weekend alone. Japan delivered the tournament’s single largest broadcast audience at 22.4 million on Nippon TV for Japan versus Tunisia.
In Brazil, the tournament produced several landmark moments for digital distribution. The Brazil-Haiti group stage match set what FIFA confirmed as a new worldwide YouTube record for the most-watched football match ever streamed on the platform, broadcast via CazéTV. The TV Globo and SporTV combined average of 30.7 million reached 51.3 million across the entire Globo ecosystem.
CazéTV, the Brazilian YouTube channel that held FIFA 2026 streaming rights for Brazil, represents the first major example of a World Cup host-nation digital streamer functioning as a primary broadcast partner rather than a supplementary one.
More broadly, the 2026 tournament marked the first World Cup in which digital-first distribution channels such as Peacock, FOX Sports, YouTube, and TikTok formed a primary rather than supplementary part of the broadcast architecture, reflecting how fundamentally the media landscape has shifted since Qatar 2022.
What the 2026 World Cup ultimately demonstrated is that audiences will find and engage with content across whatever distribution channels are available to them. The accessibility and affordability of that content, whether free-to-air, via a pay pass, or through a digital platform, played a meaningful role in driving the record audience numbers seen across the tournament.
By Dr Amal Punchihewa
Member of Executive Committee of Media Technical Network
Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE-Broadcast Technology Society
This article written by me (Amal) was originally published on 13 August 2026 in APB+ (Asia-Pacific Broadcasting).
