USAGermany_WorldCup2014_ESPNViewershipRecord
Traders and workers watch the U.S. 2014 World Cup soccer match against Germany on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 26, 2014. Reuters/Brendan McDermid

Univision’s World Cup audience continued to grow during the match Thursday between Team USA and Germany, when 750,000 fans tuned in to the live stream of the game at the same time, helping the Spanish-language network set a new record for concurrent viewers on its website.

The number far exceeded Univision’s average of 238,000 live stream viewers per game, and Univision may have benefited from the misfortune of its main competitor in broadcasting the tournament. ESPN announced that its video-streaming app, WatchESPN, peaked at 1.7 million concurrent viewers during the U.S.-Germany game, but a programmer told Variety the network is “investigating some limited issues due to unprecedented demand.”

Translation: The streaming feed dropped.

A small but vocal subset of users took to Twitter to complain that WatchESPN was having problems at the beginning of Thursday’s match. Other users recommended that anyone lost in the streaming wilderness simply learn to love Univision. Even if the broadcast is in Spanish, they rationalized, the free, legal streaming option made Univision a more attractive place to watch the World Cup.

“Our live stream absolutely did not experience any outages,” a Univision representative told Variety.

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