IShowSpeed is taking his World Cup coverage into a new lane. Darren Watkins Jr. said on Wednesday that some World Cup games will stream on his channel through a partnership with FIFA, Fox Sports and YouTube, with live match footage built into the broadcast.
The arrangement matters because it gives one of the internet’s biggest sports personalities a role in how fans watch the tournament, not just how they talk about it. said Speed will carry the semifinal matches and the final next month, and that select knockout-round games will be announced later.
For American viewers, the streams will run on the Fox One Prime Channel on YouTube and on the Fox One streaming service. Fans outside the U.S. are expected to watch through Speed’s YouTube channel. Watkins still told viewers, “You guys are going to be able to watch some of the World Cup games right here on my stream,” and said he wanted to keep pushing the boundaries of streaming while helping creators do something that had never been done before.
There is a catch. People in the U.S. can still watch Watkins on his personal YouTube channel during the matches, but they will not see the game feed there. That makes the partnership less like an open simulcast on one creator channel and more like a split distribution model, with the live match carried only on the Fox and YouTube routes that were set up for it.
The rollout also shows how quickly the sport is changing its packaging for younger fans who follow games outside traditional television. Watkins, who has long made his name around soccer and Cristiano Ronaldo, drew 9.2 million viewers for Portugal’s opener on Wednesday, a number that helps explain why broadcasters are willing to put a creator at the center of a World Cup stream. He previously hosted a simulcast of YouTube’s Week 1 NFL broadcast last fall.
The first group-stage simulcast already has a date: Argentina vs. Austria in Dallas on June 22. After that, the biggest pieces remain the ones still to be named. Fox has said the knockout-round schedule will expand, but it has not yet spelled out which matches will join the lineup. That leaves one question hanging over the deal even as it goes live: how far this model can go once the semifinals and final arrive next month.
