It’s the match that neither side wanted to be playing at the beginning of the week, but after semi-final disappointment, England and Belgium have the chance to leave the 2018 World Cup in Russia on a high with a third place finish. And we’ll tell you your World Cup live stream options so you can watch for free from anywhere.

Following their pedestrian group stage clash when both teams had already qualified for the next round, the two sides again meet in unusual circumstances and are likely to field much-changed teams once more. Belgium’s second string deserved their 1-0 win the first time out, with Adnan Januzaj’s cracking strike proving the difference, and will therefore enter this one as favorites. 

But England should provide fired-up opposition as they bid to restore the feel-good factor they created back home during their run to the semi-finals. Sparingly-used players like Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Marcus Rashford and Jamie Vardy will have a point to prove and could be a handful for Belgium’s second string if given the nod.

To make sure you’re tuned in for the conclusion of the tournament – including, of course, the France vs Croatia World Cup final – you can catch up with our World Cup watching guide. For all the info specific to this third place play-off, keep scrolling down. 

Use a VPN to watch the World Cup 2018 from anywhere for FREE

You don’t have to miss a single minute of World Cup soccer – even if the country where you are isn’t broadcasting certain games. Because every second of action is being shown somewhere (the UK, for example, is televising every game for free – see below), you can simply use a VPN to login to a region that is broadcasting the game. And it’s really easy to do:

How to stream England vs Belgium live in the UK 

How to watch England vs Belgium: US live stream 

How to watch Belgium vs England: Canada live stream 

How to watch England vs Belgium: Australia live stream 

How to watch Belgium vs England: New Zealand live stream 

Exclusive World Cup competition with VyprVPN

http://www.techradar.com/news/belgium-vs-england-live-stream-how-to-watch-world-cup-third-place-play-off-online

As World Cup fever can attest, football is in its prime at the moment. The matches have never been better (arguably), the players more famous or indeed expensive. But the beautiful game is facing an ugly problem: younger fans are being swayed elsewhere because of rising ticket prices and the changing face of where they get their media. 

TV watching is down, streaming and YouTube viewing is up. Without these fans, the future of the game could be in doubt. 

But football broadcasts are adapting to the needs of its younger audience, taking cues and inspiration from their direct competitors and one of the reasons it is doing this, is because of esports.

The rise of esports

Competitive gaming has well and truly hit the mainstream. Services such as Twitch have made it easy to follow the myriad gaming tournaments happening at the moment. Whatever your esports quirk – from Fifa to Fortnite – you can log on and stream the action. 

According to Campaign, some 385 million followed esports in all its forms last year and by 2020 that number is set to grow to 589 million.

The money for those participating – not to mention those streaming – is incredibly lucrative and the fan bases that have appeared are incredibly loyal. 

For those who dismiss esports because it isn’t a real sport are missing the point. Take, for instance, the recent Fortnite league that happened at this year’s E3. This was a precursor to Fortnite’s $100 million tournament bounty which is already underway. 

It was a charity tournament where 50 Twitch and YouTube personalities and 50 celebrities played it out to win a $3 million prize pot. The final took place in a packed-out stadium, and the Twitch feed at one point had 700,000 concurrent people watching. 

Yes, you get more people turn up to watch two teams kick a ball around but for something that’s in its infancy, this is impressive stuff. 

Leagues and legends

The Premier League in the UK has taken notice, too. Manchester City and West Ham United already have esports players on their books and this has got people speculating that an esports Premier League is about to happen.

And why not, given esports is a sports offshoot after all? Well, that’s where the problem lies. Not even esports fans know if what they are watching is a sport, despite the name. A study by Nielsen found only 53% consider esports to be an actual sport. When asked if it should be in the Olympics, only 28% agreed. 

A big advocate for calling exports a sport is League of Legends developer Riot Games. It made a superb video that puts the argument to rest. 

A sport needs competition, dedication and a fan base – there’s nothing better than watching people on the top of their game compete against each other. 

Eli Gallagher is a professional Overwatch gamer who plays with the Evil Geniuses esports team. Speaking to TechRadar about how he prepares for a tournament he explained: “The way I practice is I try to get ten hours of serious game-play in a day, where I’m taking the game 100% seriously. 

“That means I’m playing to win, I’m playing to do the best I can in each of those games. That wasn’t always easy when I started, because I had high school. Balancing playing Overwatch and sleeping and going to school was a really tight fit.”

This type of dedication is a familiar story for athletes the world over, whether their game is football or darts and it is now the same for esports. 

No wonder the fan base is growing.

The Fifa effect

As much as you would think that a game such as Fifa would bring people closer to football, it has actually given many a skewed version of what watching football is like. The instant replays, quirky camera angles and truncated match times have all created an immediacy to football that may not always be there in the real game. 

Forget England expects, football fans that have grown up on a daily diet of Fifa expect a premium slickness to the game that you just aren’t going to get on a rainy day in Stoke. 

The brilliance of football sims has made the beautiful game better to watch on television though. 

Broadcasters have learned from computer games and adopted some of their style in how they approach the filming of a football match and the analysis that follows. Long gone are the days when a scribbled circle on a piece of paper suffices as match analysis. 

Now pundits are fast-forwarding to key moments, using tablets to rotate camera angles, zoom in on the action and cut out and physically move players from parts of the pitch to other areas, seamlessly, 

Sky’s the limit

Sky, in the UK, is undoubtedly the star at doing this and it’s currently using tablets and gaming technology in its game analysis.

“Tablets continue to be at the forefront of broadcasting, powered by ChyronHego and Piero technology,” explained Sky Sports Head of Football Gary Hughes at a recent event. 

“They allow our pundits to cover every aspect of the game and break down key moments. Opta data is fed directly into those screens, allowing pundits access to touch-maps and positions, providing our customers with extra detail and depth to analysis.”

Sky also uses data from EA Sports to help with their coverage. 

“Our partnership with EA Sports allows us to recreate any moment from any game, to provide additional views and perspectives from officials or player points of view,” Hughes notes. 

“Then there’s our studio technology, where an Ncam and VR tracking system brings team line ups, formations and social media interaction into the studio environment and also allows us to create a virtual window into our studio.”

It’s not just in the UK where this gamification of football broadcasting is happening. TechRadar spoke to Roger Brosel, Head of Content and Programming, at La Liga – the Spanish football league – back in March about its approach to broadcasting football and it is also looking to videogames for inspiration. 

“Someones first experience with football isn’t on the television. Right now many kids get into football through videogames, they have played as their favourite players in FIFA,” said Brosel. 

“They may not have experienced seeing these players live so they get used to videogame-style shots of the game – close-ups of the ball, cameras behind the player about to shoot a penalty – instead of the typical camera one angle. 

“We want to update how we deliver football to our fans and we think that Sky Cam helps us a lot.” 

The Sky Cam Brosel mentions has been around since the 90s. It’s a camera system that’s suspended by cables and zips around above the players’ heads when the game is on. 

It’s fast, nimble and can offer some brilliant shots that a static camera just can’t achieve. Two people remotely control it: a pilot that moves the device and one that controls the camera. Brosel believes the use of this offers up a videogame sheen to their broadcasts. 

“We wanted to make La Liga look cool and you can get some great shots with the Sky Cam,” said Brolis. “Before we used it, it was only really used in top games but we wanted it to become standard in La Liga. It makes the broadcast really beautiful and makes the angles spectacular. 

“We have worked with the clubs and installed a Sky Cam permanently in their venues. It’s currently available in eight stadiums.”

Another piece of technology used in La Liga is Intel True View. Favoured by the NFL, this technology uses 38 5K cameras to stick together a 360-degree view of the match, so it can be replayed at any angle – even from the point of view of a player. 

This means that a highlight reel of a football match will be as interactive as any videogame. La Liga is hoping it’s these innovations that will entice younger viewers to put down the controller and watch their matches.

Videogames aren’t the enemy of sport, but the present and the future. There are certain commonalities between putting on a pair headphones and a pair of boots – the pitch may look different but the will to win is the same. 

TechRadar’s World Cup coverage is brought to you in association with Honor.

http://www.techradar.com/news/how-football-is-turning-to-videogames-to-stay-relevant

Intel Whiskey Lake will supposedly be behind the next generation of laptops, but what do we know about it?

Because it wouldn’t be 2018 without a plethora of different Intel releases that may or may never actually happen, we thought it would be fitting to dive into all the details and rumors revolving around Intel Whiskey Lake. Another week another microarchitecture, amirite?

Let’s take things back to Computex 2018 real quick. Intel was all over the news, for its 28-core behemoth, but it also shared another key piece of information – that two new mobile-based microarchitectures would make their way to the public in the near future – Amber Lake Y-series and Whiskey Lake U-series. 

Now, why these are two separate microarchitectures is beyond us, but they’re both products of the third refinement of Skylake, and act as a direct successor to Kaby Lake-R. You might find yourself thinking “wait a second, weren’t there some Coffee Lake U-series processors announced back in like April?” 

You’d be right! However, we actually haven’t seen many laptops with these Intel Coffee Lake U-series processors – most of the best laptops this year have featured either Kaby Lake-R or Coffee Lake H-series chips. Still, we do have reason to believe that the newly refreshed MacBook Pro 2018 is rocking Coffee Lake U-series processors. 

Whiskey Lake U-series chips, then, if the rumors are actually true, would be behind some of the best Ultrabook releases come this fall. Especially if they really do feature boost clocks that are 500MHz faster than the current Kaby Lake-R chips. 

Beyond that initial hint from Computex, we don’t have any official information to go off of, but we have a boatload of leaks, rumors and wanton speculation. So strap yourself in and bookmark this page, as we’ll update it with any new information as it surfaces.

Cut to the chase

•  What is it? The reported next mobile Intel microarchitecture 
•  When is it out? Likely Fall 2018 
•  What will it cost? Depends on the laptop 

Release date

Manufacturers are already starting to list Whiskey Lake CPUs, according to rumors from Wccftech, so we can reasonably expect to see them in the wild later this year. Unlike the Coffee Lake-S chips that will kick off the 9th-generation, we don’t really think the Whiskey Lake U-series of processors will have that much fanfare surrounding it. 

Instead, we’ll likely just see some laptops with the new processors launch sometime this Fall – probably refreshes of some of the best Ultrabooks, like the HP Spectre x360, Dell XPS 13 and maybe even the Surface Laptop 2.

Price

Because Whiskey Lake is a mobile microarchitecture, it’s unlikely that the price of the actual chip will affect most consumers. For instance, the Intel Core i5-8250U is listed at $297 (about £225, AU$400) and the Intel Core i7 8550U at $409  (about £310, AU$551). However, these aren’t really public facing prices, and is rather what laptop manufacturers pay to include these chips in their laptops.

So, according to that leak reported by Wccftech, we’re getting both an Core i7 and a Core i5 processor. We can probably expect laptops packing the Core i5 chip to start around $800 (£606, AU$1,079), whereas Core i7-backed laptops will be more expensive, probably around $1,000 (£760, AU$1,350).    

Either way, if the release is as close as rumors suggest, we’ll see pricing information for Whiskey Lake-powered laptops in the very near future.

Specs

If the specs leaked by infamous benchmark leaker Tum Apisak are accurate, we’re looking at two main CPUs included in the Whiskey Lake family: the Core i5-8265U and i7-8565U. These are both four-core, eight-thread chips, much like their Kaby Lake-R brethren. Where they really set themselves apart, however, is their clock speeds.

The stock clocks on both of these chips are virtually the same as the Core i5-8250U and Core i7-8550U at 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz respectively. But, if these leaks are to be believed, Intel has found a way to increase the Turbo Boost for both of these CPUs by another substantial 500MHz.

The increase in performance likely wouldn’t be as substantial as the move from 7th-generation Kaby Lake to 8th-Generation Kaby Lake-R – we’re not getting any extra cores. However, this much of an increase in Turbo Boost speeds may still potentially lead to double-digit increases in performance, especially with single-threaded applications. What’s better, Whiskey Lake processors will apparently be capable of this clock speed increase without upping the TDP.

As far as the integrated GPU goes, though, it looks like Intel is sticking with the Intel UHD Graphics 620 chip found in the Kaby Lake-R chips, so don’t expect vastly improved GPU performance with this new microarchitecture.

We’re sure more concrete information is going to come out in the following months regarding the specs of these Intel Whiskey Lake chips, so be sure to check back often, as we’ll add any information that comes our way.

http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-whiskey-lake