PICTURES IN THE PAPER

The convergence of media business takes another step today with the live showing of England's World Cup match in Ukraine via a newspaper's website.

The Daily Telegraph is advertising live coverage of the match which is not being shown on television.

Closer inspection reveals that the Telegraph is not actually generating any of the webstream itself, merely piggy-backing the service which has been set up by the rights holders, Kentaro, and has been acquired by the online betting company Bet365.com. The Telegraph's link takes you through to the Bet365 site where you can either pay £11.99 to access the match - or view it for free if you open a betting account. A lot of mutual back-scratching is going on here.

But the arrival of a national newspaper, especially a non-Murdoch paper, as a player in what was once the sole preserve of TV companies is another interesting development in the pellmell progress of multimedia sports access.

Kentaro is another name worth watching. The Swiss company has been a backroom player for some considerable time, buying rights to sporting events from the organisers and selling them on to TV companies across the globe. Now they have emerged as a rather more than a go-between, willing to engage directly with the public if they can't obtain then price they want via their usual marketing methods.