The Best Ways to Watch the World Cup.

Hey World Cup fans, get ready to watch the world's biggest single-sport competition from the comfort of your laptop. Held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the first of 64 matches will kick off today!  We will be watching the games today, Thursday, starting at 2pm, right here at school!

This year's championship is more digitally interactive than ever before. With apps and beefed-up streaming services, here's how to keep up with the game's hectic schedule.

To watch the games live on TV, here are the channels you should tune into:

·         USA: ESPN, ABC and Univision

·         UK: BBC and ITV

·         Australia: SBS

·         Brazil: Globo

For a full list of countries and their corresponding networks that have licensing rights to broadcast the games, check out this source provided by FIFA. For a complete schedule of all games, check out this detailed list on ESPN. Sports Interaction also has a beautiful interactive schedule.

It's important to note that mega TV networks mainly hold all the rights to streaming the games online. (Though there are plenty of other sites that might stream the matches, they're not always legal.)

USA: ESPN, the all-sports-all-the-time network, is all over the event. The channel will not only present all of the games live on TV via ESPN (43 matches), ESPN2 (11 matches) and ABC (10 matches), it will livestream all 64 games online. Every game will be available via the WatchESPNsite and app, which is available for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Chromecast and more.

The 10 games that air on ABC will be available via WatchABC. However, these online services are only available for those who already have cable and pay for access to the network.  Another site making the games available is Univision. The Spanish language network will air 56 games on Univision Deportes, its sports channel, as well as via its UD app. Like ESPN, the service is only available to subscribed viewers.

Twitter: If you're truly addicted to the social site, you can't watch a major telecast without constantly checking your feed. So keep up with the sport via Twitter by following certain hashtags. The site Fanbrandz has put together a fun, handy guide to tags you should expect, like #GoSocceroos (for Australian fans), #EmBuscaDoHexa (for Brazilian fans) and #Bleus (for French fans).

Facebook: Make sure to "like" ESPN FC, the network's channel dedicated to the beautiful game. The World Cup also has an official page of its own, full of behind-the-scenes photos and interviews with soccer stars.

Instagram:  the FIFA World Cup has an official Instagram page where it posts all kinds of fun photos of players and fans.

Vine: Six second videos will give you quick doses of the beautiful game. Vine has a World Cup-themed page with all kinds of video posts about the upcoming matches. 

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