If you’re not already sick of football matches at 4 a.m. and players rolling around on the grass like they’ve been shot by the Death Star, you may want to take care when trying to catch a game online. Here’s a Tumblr located at
worldcuptv(dot)tumblr(dot)com
which wants visitors to select their hoop-jump in order to watch one of their 76+ available football channels.
To view the football games, you have to fill in a survey. If there’s no survey available in your area, they have backup in the form of SMS and “share a link” options instead:
Switching off Javascript will produce a message which tells the visitor they need to re-enable it (because otherwise they can’t see all the wonderful offers and SMS unlock screens).
If you’re quick, you can click the screenshot of the football field and end up on a site which claims to offer multiple streams of various events.
At time of writing, there’s no matches taking place but clicking the first stream box to open it up and see all the streaming action shows the following:
There’s no indication I can see which informs the end-user that the four boxes are actually just one clickable advert, and pressing any of the above will take them to an ad which is likely served up depending on geographical region. In this case, a speedtest:
Perhaps these adverts in the play boxes are replaced by an actual stream when a live match is on, but given that there’s no way to know where these clickable adverts will take you I’d say it probably isn’t worth the risk.
You’ll find there’s an awful lot of nations broadcasting the games on TV (with none of the SMS signups and advert clicking) as it is, and if you dig around on sites such as Reddit and elsewhere you’ll find helpful people have collected links of legal streams offered up by TV stations and sporting networks where you can register and watch for free.
Don’t get too cosy with random streams found on Tumblrs and other sites – you never really know what you’ll have to do to see the videos, or what you’ll eventually get in return for your efforts.
Christopher Boyd