Here’s a quick way to get fired: try to watch the BBC’s live internet streams of World Cup matches from your office computer. Running bandwidth-hogging video will cripple the company’s network.

Showing sport live online is a novelty — we are more used to seeing recorded events — and the BBC has been hyping it to the hilt. Roger Moseley, head of sport, says: “This reflects us taking seriously what you’ve been saying: you want BBC Sport on the platform and at the time of your choice.” Yet live webcasts of the World Cup are as potty an idea as playing Owen Hargreaves up front.

The BBC promised a live stream of “at least 256kbps” but on Friday it didn’t exceed 225 on my PC. For Newsnight, say, this yields an adequate video image, typically the size of a paperback, but, as you’ll see at news. bbc.co.uk/sport, it’s hopeless for fast-moving football. I didn’t realise Germany had scored until they showed the close-up action replay.

I have watched hours of football video streams this season, and 948kbps is the minimum rate required for a game to be watchable. If the BBC delivers that speed to a mass audience, I’ll eat my England mouse mat.

In fact, if the BBC maintains a picture at all for 90 minutes, I’ll eat my mouse. Although it assures us that its servers have “the capacity to cope with demand” for the World Cup, the BBC is relying on what it calls “standard streaming technology”, a notoriously vulnerable means of transmission when viewers flock to watch simultaneously. Pictures break up during bottlenecks or disappear altogether.

What fans don’t understand is why they can’t view a decent-sized live picture online. For the 1998 World Cup, broadband was a nonstarter; and in 2002, Doors was haranguing BT to get serious about its pitiful broadband roll-out. By 2006, video downloading has become a routine web event, yet live streaming remains a backup rather than a goal in its own right.

The BBC recognises the challenge as people’s viewing migrates to the web, which is why, for the past few months, it has been trialling a technology called multicasting, feeding its live television and radio channels to the computers of volunteers. Multicasting shares the burden of bandwidth with an internet provider to maintain live feeds during periods of heavy demand. In practice, video quality is marginally improved in a cigarette-pack sized screen, but pictures freeze or vanish with monotonous regularity at peak times.

I’ve tried the multicasting service on 512k, 2MB and 8MB broadband connections, and the problems persist, suggesting that the BBC cannot cope with the 200,000 people on this, albeit limited, trial — an audience comparable to last year’s live online coverage of the Club World Championship from Japan.

So, where else can connected football addicts turn? You can transform most computers into a full-screen television with a USB-based digital tuner such as the Nebula DigiTV (£80 from www.nebula-electronics.com). The PC can sometimes act as a personal video recorder, so tonight you could watch Angola v Portugal in sumptuous detail while recording The West Wing. From an external aerial, the picture quality is first-rate (and I’m told the Elgato EyeTV is its equal for Mac owners).

New to the UK this week is the Slingbox (£185 from www.pcworld.co.uk), a clever device that relays pictures from its television tuner to your computer over the internet.

Anyone with a 3 mobile phone is promised free goal highlights five minutes after games finish, while at T-Mobile they will cost you £5.

I retain grave doubts over video quality on mobiles. For now, you can’t beat watching the World Cup on a widescreen television, but, like young Theo Walcott, technology can only mature. Roll on South Africa 2010.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming