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Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The World Cup, which kicks off in Brazil this month, is set for a record global television audience thanks to new technology and fan-friendly scheduling, FIFA's television director Niclas Ericson told Reuters on Monday , Reuters reported.

The quadrennial tournament is the world's biggest sporting event and some matches, including the final in Rio de Janeiro on July 13, will be broadcast in ultra high definition for the first time.

"We have some reasons to say the audience will increase. We worked very hard on the match schedule and the times we have now, we think will be very good for the football fan," Ericson said by telephone from Rio.

"We think we have very good kick off times for Africa, the Middle East and Europe and will continue to grow the audience there. And as the World Cup is in the Americas, we'll have even better figures from there than ever before," he added.

"Asia has grown very fast in term of viewers and rights fees and I believe that even on paper before the event it looks extremely good to break the records we have."

Ericson would not speculate on numbers, saying FIFA still struggled to audit figures in certain parts of the world, but for the first time FIFA had a rights contract in place with every country or territory and the interest was enormous.

"We know that an opening match featuring Brazil is going to be record-breaking across the world because it is Brazil," he added.

FIFA research, which took a year to produce after the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, said 909.6 million television viewers tuned in to at least one minute of the 2010 final at home.

Some 619.7 million people also watched at least 20 consecutive minutes of Spain's 1-0 extra-time win over the Netherlands in Johannesburg.

More than 3.2 billion people watched live coverage of the 2010 tournament for a minimum of one minute. The average official rating was 188.4 million for each match.

The figures claimed an average increase of between 3 to 8 per cent from the 2006 finals in Germany.

By comparison, an estimated global audience of 900 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.