More and more, the term media now refers to the Internet and the ongoing 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil is confirming this in a big way.

The World Cup has set new Internet-video streaming records for ESPN, Univisión and Akamai, three of the world's leading Internet content providers. In social media, Brazil's games have generated the largest number of Facebook interactions and Tweets in the first week of the World Cup.

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On Twitter, the Brazil-Croatia match won by Brazil, 3-1, is the most tweeted so far with 12.2 million Tweets. The Germany versus Portugal match won 4-0 by "Die Mannschaft" is the second-most tweeted.

Brazil's 3-1 rout of Croatia on June 12 generated 58 million Facebook comments and more than 140 million Facebook interactions, currently the Facebook record for the World Cup.

Still in its opening round, the massively popular World Cup has already broken the record for peak amount of online-video streaming bandwidth as delivered by Akamai Technologies. It also set new viewing records for ESPN's and Univisión's digital-video services.

Univisión is a Spanish language broadcast television network in the US owned by Univision Communications. Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an Internet content delivery network headquartered in Massachusetts. It is one of the world's largest distributed-computing platforms, and serves from 15 percent to 30 percent of all web traffic.

ESPN is a U.S.-based global cable and satellite television channel that focuses on sports-related programming including live event telecasts and sports talk shows.

Akamai said the Germany versus Portugal match on June 16 hit a peak 4.3 terabits per second of streaming video on its content-delivery network. That was way past the previous high of 3.5 Tbps for the U.S. versus Canada men's hockey semifinal during the 2014 Winter Olympics that Canada won.

The streaming-video peak for the USA versus Ghana footballmatch came in at 3.2 Tbps compared to the Friday the 13th match between The Netherlands and Spain that saw a streaming-video peak of 3.4 Tbps.

ESPN, however, said the USA-Ghana match was the biggest-ever event for WatchESPN. It said 1.4 million people watched the USA beat Ghana, 2-1, on its digital-video service for a total of 62.4 million viewer minutes.

The Germany versus Portugal match was WatchESPN's second-best event ever with 1.1 million unique viewers and average-minute audience (418,000). It was third in minutes viewed at 52.6 million.

Univision said the Germany-Portugal match had 2 million online-video viewers, second only to the Mexico-Cameroon match that recorded 2.8 million views. 

Univision's stream of USA versus Ghana had 1.7 million online-video viewers, ranking it as the fourth most-watched live stream on Univision Digital to date.

On TV, ESPN's coverage of USA-Ghana was its best ever for a World Cup game, averaging 11.09 million viewers on Monday. Univision had 4.8 million viewers, said Nielsen.

Records are certain to be broken as the World Cup heads for the July 13 final.

TagsSports, streaming, Record