Young Hollywood Is Already Planning Its 2014 FIFA World Cup Coverage

The first match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup won’t kick off in Brazil until June 12, 2014, but online organizations are already inking deals to prep their coverage. Just days after ESPN made public its plans on how it will report on and broadcast the most popular sporting contest in the world (which, for better or worse, doesn’t include any coverage in 3D), multimedia entertainment company, online destination, and new media studio Young Hollywood announced plans for an upcoming channel “to capitalize on the excitement and celebrity buzz surrounding FIFA World Cup 2014 in Rio.”

The entertainment entity founded by RJ Williams back in 2007 has partnered on the channel with Momentum Entertainment Group, a division of creative and production house Momentum Worldwide that produces everything from full-fledged series to one-off branded campaigns for Fortune 500 consumer companies. The as-of-yet unnamed online video destination won’t launch until April 2013, but will “stay true to the Young Hollywood reputation for taking its audience beyond the velvet rope with exclusive access and one-of-a-kind coverage, revealing the inside stories of celebrity life as told by the celebrities themselves – this time right from the World Cup epicenter in Brazil.”

Here’s Williams on the deal’s announcement:

“There’s an untold story of the World Cup celebrity experience that Young Hollywood will tell in living color, in a channel that will lead to new partnerships and content opportunities.”

It sounds exciting, and if magazines containing photographs of members of the British Monarchy are some of the most popular items on American newsstands, than certainly online video coverage of domestic and foreign soccer stars through the lens of celebrity can draw an audience. And that audience is exactly the why Young Hollywood and MEG announced the deal so early. They want to do everything they can to maximize the advertising revenue they can get from the audience they predict they will have.

Like Rome, advertising deals and branded campaigns are rarely built in a day. If entertainment companies hope to profit from the influx of advertising dollars (especially from sports and leisure brands) surrounding the 2014 World Cup, they have to start setting those ad deals in motion well before the actual event. A nine-month lead time should give Williams and execs at MEG an opportunity to put some major deals in motion.

And this, undoubtedly, is the first of many more digital media-related 2014 FIFA World Cup stories. Stay tuned.