CazéTV's 4K World Cup: 12 ENG Crews, Three-Person IBC, Four Distribution Platforms

CazéTV's operation proves a digital-native broadcaster can execute premium sports production at World Cup scale with three people at the IBC, bonded cellular instead of satellite trucks, and direct crew-to-Rio workflows that eliminate unnecessary encode/decode hops. The multi-platform distribution challenge requires parallel encoding pipelines: YouTube, Disney+, Samsung TV, and Amazon Prime each demand different codecs from a single source feed. This validates the creator-led sports rights model competing with established broadcasters for premium live content. Watch whether CazéTV's YouTube concurrent-viewer records — already broken three times during group stage — keep climbing into knockout rounds, which would quantify audience migration from linear to digital for marquee sports.

CazéTV, launched in 2022 by Brazilian YouTuber Casimiro Miguel in partnership with sports marketing firm LiveMode, began by streaming one match per day during the Qatar World Cup — just 22 matches total. FIFA awarded the channel rights to all 104 matches of the 2026 tournament in July 2025, per SportsPro, marking the first time a Brazilian rights holder other than Grupo Globo controlled full World Cup coverage. The deal also raised eyebrows because LiveMode served as both FIFA's media rights agent in Brazil and CazéTV's backer, according to decodeTV.

The channel's audience has scaled rapidly. CazéTV's YouTube channel now has 35.4 million subscribers, per SportBusiness, and has broken its own concurrent-viewer record three times during the group stage: 12.4 million for Brazil-Morocco on June 13, 16.2 million for Brazil-Haiti on June 20, and 18.3 million for Brazil-Scotland on June 25. YouTube itself surpassed 20 million total peak concurrent viewers during the tournament's opening match, per Streams Charts. According to Kantar Ibope Media data cited by local press, YouTube recorded a 13% audience share on TV sets in Brazil this year, surpassing pay TV.

FIFA's broader digital strategy includes making YouTube a "preferred platform" for the 2026 World Cup, per Reuters, March 2026, allowing broadcast partners to stream the first 10 minutes of every match and selected full games on their YouTube channels. FIFA struck a similar preferred-platform deal with TikTok in January 2026, per SportsPro. Cristiano Ronaldo's reported investment in LiveMode, noted by the Times of India, has further elevated CazéTV's global profile.

On the production technology side, LiveU is supporting more than 100 broadcasters and agencies at the tournament with its full EcoSystem — including LU900Q and LU800 field units, LiveU IQ (LIQ) for AI-driven carrier switching, and LiveU Record for cloud-based ingest — per Sports Video Group, June 2026. This marks the first time LiveU has deployed its complete production stack at a single event.