The decision by FIFA to nearly double the size of the World Cup has not drawn universal praise, but it is an undeniable boost to U.S. media rights holders Fox and Telemundo.

The most recent men’s edition of the Cup, held in Qatar in 2022, featured 32 nations and 64 matches. This one, played in 16 cities across North America, will see 104 matches played by 48 nations over a five-week span starting Thursday. For media partners, that extra inventory has been a significant boost. In what tends to be a sleepy time of year, the tournament will provide daily, ad-friendly programming with a larger footprint than the Olympics, a best-of-7 playoff series or any other marquee sporting event.

Accordingly, Fox Sports VP of Production Zac Kenworthy says he and his colleagues are prepping “the biggest production Fox Sports has ever put on in our company’s history.”

Two-thirds of all matches, the exec noted at a recent press day in New York, will air on the Fox broadcast network, with the remainder on cable’s FS1. All 104 will be available on Fox One, the streaming flagship launched last year. Free streaming outlet Tubi will also be mobilized, airing select live matches as well as shoulder and Cup-themed programming.

This is the first Cup since 1994 to be played in North America, and Americans’ interest in soccer has skyrocketed since that edition. Premier League and even MLS matches routinely pull in millions of viewers across broadcast and streaming.

Kenworthy said being on “home turf” will enable Fox to show off Stage B, a revamped production hub in Los Angeles with an LED, augmented-reality wall whose display has 50 million pixels. “It’s going to allow us to delve in deeper to the matches, to talk about the game in different ways, present the game in different ways,” he said.

Fox’s studio cameras, some of which will be sourced from tech startup and media partner Cosm, will deliver the first World Cup in high-dynamic range. The HDR visual format allows for a wider spectrum of color and lighting. Kenworthy said the result will be an experience that is “rich” and “quite different” from past Cups. “It’s not going to be oversaturated, but it’s going to feel real,” he said.

The production team aims to make the transitions from Stage B to 16 remote sites “seamless,” Kenworthy said, in part by “populating our set with the sound and the feel of the stadium.”

Fox has aired the World Cup since 2015, with its current rights deal due to expire after this year’s tournament. It averaged 3.6 million viewers for each of the 32 matches in 2022, according to Nielsen, surging to a record 16.8 million for Argentina’s thrilling win over France in the final. Telemundo has rights through 2030. It pulled in an average of 2.6 million viewers in 2022.

Joaquin Duro, EVP of sports and head of streaming at NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, sees this Cup as an opportunity to attract viewers to Telemundo’s non-sports programming. Unlike Hispanic rival TelevisaUnivision, which operates a dedicated streaming service, Vix, Telemundo programming is exclusive to NBCU streaming flagship Peacock.

In a shift from the approach of 2022, when the Cup shifted back to November and December due to the summer heat in host country Qatar, Telemundo will be using games as lead-ins on linear as well as streaming. “All of the folks that we have watching soccer, we do have ‘next play’ within Peacock, which is another very, very important feature,” Duro told Deadline in an interview. “And then we can transition those viewers into the next big streaming moment, which will be our reality and scripted series.”

A big block of new primetime programming is due to premiere on July 7, which coincides with the round of 16 in the Cup. In 2022, by contrast, the tournament ended in mid-December and then Telemundo’s new programming did not debut until early-January. “You landed on Peacock and that retrenched the retention strategy,” Duro said. “You’ve got an English-language interface and then you’re telling people, ‘Hey, by the way, in 20 days, come back!’”

Telemundo’s audience is largely bilingual, Duro noted, with 35% of consumption in 2022 being in English. It is also diverse within the Spanish-language realm, with large expat communities representing a number of Cup hopefuls, ranging from perennial title contenders Argentina and Brazil to upstarts like Panama.

Plenty of Telemundo viewers, Duro added, will be rooting for the U.S., given how many blended families are tuning in. Since the 2022 World Cup, he said, Telemundo has promoted what it calls “el equipo de todos, which is ‘the team of all of us,’” Duro said. “I am from Spain, but my family is born here. So they’re voting from the United States. So we need to root for Spain and the United States; Colombia and the United States, Mexico and the United States.”

One element in the mix this year has no allegiance to any particular team: the weather. After moving the summer fixture to the late-autumn in 2022, FIFA has stuck with the summer, but the prospect of extreme heat or thunderstorms playing havoc with the schedule is not a remote one. “Scheduling has also been developed with climate considerations in mind,” a FIFA spokesperson told Deadline in a statement. “The match schedule balances sporting, operational and broadcast requirements while minimizing travel, maximizing rest days and accounting for local climate profiles and venue infrastructure, based on the extensive heat-risk analysis carried out by FIFA at each location.

“Outdoor matches during the hottest parts of the day have been strategically limited, kick-off times adjusted in certain markets, and matches expected in warmer windows prioritised for covered stadiums where possible.”

Fox and Telemundo referred questions about their approach to potential weather delays to FIFA, but the hope is that any rough weather will not dominate given the length of the tournament.