A sports-themed exhibition was held at a shopping mall in Beijing ahead of the World Cup opening on June 11, 2026.
CNBC | Chow Yin Hong
BEIJING — Gone are the days when you needed to buy a portable mini TV to watch World Cup soccer matches on the go.
Instead, Chinese consumers can simply pull out their phones. Soccer is popular in China, even though the national team has not qualified for the World Cup since 2002.
“We mainly watch on smartphones and rarely watch on TV,” Fei Jing said. “The TV at home is basically not used. Sometimes I turn on the TV last minute to watch a game, but most of the time I watch it on my cell phone.”
This year, Chinese social media company Xiaohongshu won the rights to stream World Cup matches for free to all users. The app, also known as Little Red Book, is sometimes compared to Meta’s Instagram.
Xiaohongshu’s deal is a strategic partnership with state-run China Media Group, which secured broadcast rights last week with less than a month until the World Cup started. The company operates China Central Television (CCTV), which offers both mobile and smart TV apps that allow subscribers to watch matches and replays without ads.
A CNBC spot check found that locals in Beijing were less keen to go out to bars for this year’s World Cup matches, instead watching the games online, often from home.
This year, due to the more than 12-hour time difference, games tend to be held late at night or during early morning work hours. The interview has been translated from the original Mandarin.
“If my friends are interested in the World Cup, they will definitely watch it at home,” said Xu Wang, who works at Absolut Bar in a tourist-filled area of Beijing. “It’s hard to find good places for people to gather at that time of the night, especially since everyone is spread out all over the city.”
The move to mobile devices builds on China’s digital-first trend.
According to FIFA, China already accounted for almost half of all viewing time on digital and social platforms worldwide during the 2022 World Cup.
Widespread 5G connectivity and relatively low-cost roaming packages will help. According to QuestMobile, people in China already spend 40% of their daily time on their phones watching videos, primarily on short video apps such as ByteDance’s Douyin.
To keep up with World Cup matches, Quan Zhao said he scrolls through Douyin and plans to watch only the last few games in full. He doesn’t know yet whether he will go out to do so.
This reflects how difficult it is for Xiaohongshu to leverage World Cup streaming to reach more users.
Douyin acquired the streaming rights to the 2022 World Cup, at a time when many people in China were still facing restrictions on gatherings and movement due to the coronavirus. This time, Douyin is promoting a rich lineup of soccer commentators and creators, along with a World Cup-themed AI special effects template.
Douyin has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and Xiaohongshu has 245.3 million users as of March, according to Questmobile data.
Douyin’s shopping-focused version ranked first among the top 10 downloaded apps on Apple’s China app store as of noon Monday.
CCTV’s World Cup streaming app ranked second, China’s official sports betting app ranked sixth, and Xiaohongshu ranked ninth.
Chinese tech companies aren’t just focused on the domestic market. Tencent Cloud announced on Friday that two-thirds of the official World Cup broadcast platforms in the Asia-Pacific region are using its services.
The company announced that it supports match streaming in 16 regions, including Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and Argentina. This is the largest World Cup region ever covered by a Chinese cloud provider.
