Mobile firms feed off CCTV's FIFA coverage

As Brazil and Croatia compete for the first point in the kickoff match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Chinese Internet companies are joining an equally intense head-to-head scuffle at home, trying to score big from the world's most popular sporting event that happens every four years.

Mobility, a winning ingredient for a soccer game, also is the key word in Web firms' World Cup playbooks this summer.

Mere days before whistles blow in Sao Paulo's Arena Corinthians, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's cloud-computing subsidiary said it was launching a mobile application with China Central Television to provide "the nation's only" live stream webcast of matches for mobile users.