That's a Lot of Viewers

In an altogether bizarre statement in which he suggests Zidane and Materazzi should clear the post-headbutt air by meeting on the island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, FIFA President Sepp Blatter also makes this curious claim about the 2006 World Cup:

He insisted, however, that despite its controversial denouement, the four-week tournament had been an overwhelming success, with more than 30 billion viewers worldwide. "I am still a happy Fifa president," he said.

While I'm sure there is some way of counting the television statistics that produces that number, it seems pretty safe to conclude that there were not, in fact, 30 billion viewers. There may have been half a billion viewers who watched each of the 64 matches, or something along those lines, but that's a somewhat different number, isn't it? Let's just say I'm embarrassed to admit that I spent at least 15 seconds trying to add up the number of people in China and India with access to televisions before determining that 30 billion different people did not watch the World Cup.