First up, here’s a great little documentary about Baikal:

One of the things they talk about most is the Nerpa seal, the only freshwater seal in existence. How it survives in such a small and cold ecosystem I’m not sure. Here’s a Nerpa seal video – it’s possibly my favourite Baikal Film:

The BBC were reported in 2002 as being about to make a Lake Baikal Documentary, but I haven’t been able find any copies of this on sites like Youtube. I have found this link to David Attenborough’s Living Planet documentary about Lake Baikal, which contains a beautiful high quality video of the marine life. Sadly they didn’t have an embed code, so you’ll need to visit the site to watch the video.

While researching this article, I was surprised to see that there is also a Russian company called Baikal Films which seems to exist only to make videos of naturism and Russian boys at Lake Baikal. While I’m sure they’re very attractive, I can’t help but think that I’d rather watch a video about the beautiful Nerpa seals and Baikal’s amazing ice shelf.

A few more facts about Lake Baikal – the deepest freshwater lake in the world, and is estimated to be around 25 million years old, which also makes it the world’s oldest lake. Lake Baikal is situated in Siberia, Russia, near the city of Irkutsk. More than 330 rivers feed water into Lake Baikal, but only one river flows out – the mighty River Angara, which flows north through Irkutsk and Siberia. Recently, environmental concerns about the lake have focused on the Baikalsk Wood Pulp and Paper Mill, which is on the Southern shore of the lake. The mill recently closed, a victim of the recession, but environmental groups are worried that it might soon re-open.

Baikal Films is a post from: Siberian Light

If you haven’t got a broadband connection, then you can always watch England vs Germany live commentary – BBC and ITV again offer this interesting way to watch England live, but there are also many other competitors – all the main newspapers – the Guardian, Times, Sun, etc have an online commentary throughout the match.

Once you’ve had the opportunity to watch England v Germany, you will hopefully get the chance to see England play in the World Cup quarter finals – either watch England vs Argentina live online, or watch England vs Mexico live online.

For background on the history to watching England live online, you can read this article about how England’s match with Ukraine last year was broadcast only on the internet.

For the first time in history, an England football game will not be shown on British TV. Instead, football fans will this weekend either be forced to pay to watch England v Ukraine live online, or to take a trip to their local Odeon cinema, where the game will also be broadcast live.

The ground breaking decision to broadcast the match live on the internet was taken by rights owner Kentaro after Irish-owned TV company Setanta, who had previously owned the rights to broadcast this match, went bust. Kentaro tried to sell the rights to another British broadcaster, such as BBC, ITV or Sky Sports but, as England have already qualified for this summer’s football World Cup in South Africa, nobody was interested in paying the high asking price for a match that would effectively be a friendly match, and which the England manager Fabio Capello will probably use to test a number of fringe players.

Therefore, Kentaro decided to take the brave step of partnering with online sports broadcaster Perform for a very publicly trialing pay per view online football viewing. They’ve set up a website – ukrainevengland.com – and are offering exclusive access to the match via a live internet stream.  Prices for the game have been set on a rising scale depending on how late in the day you book your access.

• £4.99 – Book by the end of Wednesday
• £9.99 – Book on Thursday or Friday
• £11.99 – Book on Saturday

The low cost obviously gives an incentive to book early.  But to add another incentive, Perform have announced that they will cap the number of people who can register to watch the game at 1 million.  This is to ensure that they don’t overload their servers.

Still, even if every single one of those million subscribers watches England play pays a mere £4.99, the match will net a cool £5 million.

In another interesting development, Perform seem to have set up some further partnership deals (presumably on the affiliate model) with top British newspapers. There are Times Online and Telegraph versions of the site that presumably take a cut of the profits when you book. These newspapers are also offering an additional way of watching the Ukraine vs England match – if you set up an account at UK online bookmaker Bet365, and ensure that your account is in credit, you get to watch England vs Ukraine live online for free.

Personally I think this is a great experiment, and I’ll be fascinated to see how it turns out.  Fans on the other hand aren’t all that keen – they’ve been grumbling about the game not being shown on terrestrial, free to air tv.  What do you think?  Will you be watching England vs Ukraine live online?  Or will you wait until to see the match highlights online later, when they are shown for free?

Watch England Live Free Online is a post from: Siberian Light