World Cup 2010: 'ITV Live' buckles under the strain

Hundreds of fan were left disappointed today as ITV’s attempt to live stream the opening match of the World Cup was blighted by technical problems.

Line dance: South Africa players celebrate after Sisphiwe Tshabalala opened the scoring against Mexico for World Cup 2010's first goal Photo: GETTY IMAGES

ITV Live, the dedicated World Cup player created by the broadcaster especially for the event, which went live today in time for the first match between South Africa versus Mexico, has bulked under the strain of fans trying to watch the match via their computers while at work.

An ITV spokesman confirmed that its World Cup microsite was experiencing technical problems. “We are aware that there has been an issue with the content delivery network within ITV Live, which may have affected the experience of a small percentage of users joining in the latter half of the match. We are working to resolve this problem. ITV.com’s main site has not been affected and viewers have been able to watch live match coverage online at www.itv.com/itv1.”

ITV Live, has been designed with the TV player featured at the centre of the web page, surrounded by a live Twitter feed, the latest match statistics and a ‘chat’ function.

Football fans expressed their frustration on Twitter.Uponnothing said: “ITV web streaming football is a huge fail. They'll pay millions for Adrian Chiles but much less on decent web servers.”

Andrewwillmott added: “Was afraid this might happen. Both tvcatchup.com and ITV completely failing under the load of the first World Cup match.”

ITV’s simulcast of ITV1 was still working while ITV Live went down and according to the broadcaster, 90,000 people watched the match in this way.

Cloud computing expert Nick Barron from Carrenza, a cloud hosting support site which helps companies whose websites need to scale quickly to manage surges in traffic, said: “Although this is extremely unfortunate for football fans, ITV has joined a long list of distinguished names that have experienced technical glitches when their websites have proved successful and resulted in huge surges in traffic.

“Today’s problems highlight how important it is for companies to ensure that their websites are designed, from the beginning, with the architecture capable of meeting high demand. It’s also critical to choose a hosting provider that allows you to flex your resources to meet spikes in demand."

ITV is sharing the live broadcast and streaming rights with the BBC and is scheduled to show 32 matches. It is also the broadcaster which is responsible for showing England’s first match of the tournament against the USA in Rustenberg.