USA fans react during the 2014 World Cup round of 16 soccer match between Belgium and the U.S. at a viewing party in Redondo Beach, California July 1, 2014.
USA fans react during the 2014 World Cup round of 16 soccer match between Belgium and the U.S. at a viewing party in Redondo Beach, California July 1, 2014. REUTERS

Soccer fans are going digital.

An official press release from the FIFA website stated that the 2014 World Cup in Brazil has set new records for online streaming from around the world—a clear sign that this new medium is challenging the more traditional way— television or cable-- of viewing the games.

The report confirmed that “this is the biggest event in terms of video content streaming on record” on the FIFA website.

“More and more football fans want to watch high quality, live coverage of matches on their tablets or mobile phones, as well as on their televisions,” said FIFA TV’s Stefan Wildemann via FIFA.COM.

Aside from online streaming of the matches in Brazil, the World Cup fever has expectedly also taken over various online channels including social media platforms Facebook and Twitter and has been consistently on top of the topics searched in search sites Google and Yahoo for the duration of the tournament.

TV and cable remains a viable option for the biggest sporting event in the world.

One breakthrough for soccer is the rise of interest and ratings in the United States, a predominantly an American Football country.

One of Team USA’s matches—the group stage game versus Portugal—became the most-watched sporting event in US cable TV history outside of the NFL games.

According to the same report “24 million unique users have already watched some 15 million hours of content through FIFA’s multimedia services solutions alone”

The beautiful game is indeed, the world’s game. And from 2014 and beyond, it appears ready to take over the online realm as well.