When a striker buries a goal this summer, hundreds of millions of people will see it almost instantly, in crisp 4K— and thousands of fans in the stands will be sharing it on their phones seconds later.
None of that “just happens.” It rides on standards.
Modern live sports broadcasting is in the middle of a big shift: away from bulky dedicated cables and toward flexible, internet-style networks. One standard that makes that possible, SMPTE ST 2110, lets video, audio, and data travel as separate streams over a single network while staying in perfect sync, from the camera to your couch. It was developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), an ANSI-accredited standards developer. The standard is so groundbreaking that SMPTE and its partners won a 2025 Emmy for it.
Then there’s everything fans don't see: the miles of cabling and dense wireless gear that let tens of thousands of people stream, post, and call at once without the network buckling. A widely used blueprint for that wiring, ANSI/TIA-568, comes from the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA)—another ANSI-accredited standards developer.
Across these and many more technologies, ANSI accredits the organizations whose consensus standards make a seamless global broadcast possible. Some of the World Cup's most impressive teamwork happens long before kickoff—on the field, and far beyond it.
Want to read more about standards that support the World Cup? Check out the other two parts of this series: Standards that Support World Cup Safety; Greener Stadiums, Built on Standards.
