Thought Indians have never been near a World Cup, unless tourists, fans and reporters count, we love to watch the World Cup matches and get excited over the wins and loses. We all used to glue our eyes to the tv when Doordarshan used to air it. We have all groaned when the idiots at the national station would record the matches and play it 45 mins late and the fucking announcers in the stadium would boast about “first time ever, we are giving you Deferred Live” like it was a big achievement. Why did they do that you asked? So they could add commercials in between like that fucking disgrace of a sport called cricket.

Anyways, with the increase of cable tv power we would get the matches and all programs done professionally. At times since this is still India, they would get Indian celebrities and non-footballers to give their expert opinion on the players and matches which were usually a joke. And then we got streaming services to watch the games. All done well as long as you have a good broadband connection. But this year things are different. This time JioCinema, a Reliance company, got the rights to stream the matches in India. Now JioCinema is free to use; all you need is to sign in as a subscriber and it is free.

But, many viewers faced issues during the livestream of the opening ceremony. When I tuned in, there was no sound in the English selection but the Malayalam one was working fine. Ok. I then waited till 9:30 pm when the opening match between hosts Qatar & Ecuador would start and the service was laggy and would freeze after 30 seconds. I switched to Malayalam and it last for a few minutes and freeze. I went to Twitter and entire India was swearing at Jio. They tried to laugh it off by showing some stupid video but things didn’t get fixed until the next day. Glad to say that yesterday and today it has been good.