The ESPN networks take over full coverage of Wimbledon for the first time next week, ending NBC’s 43-year partnership with the tournament, a switch that was motivated in part by the All-England Club’s frustration with NBC’s inability to consistently show live tennis.

ESPN will show each round of the tournament live, even showing simultaneous matches on ESPN and ESPN2 in much the same way it has recently has for major soccer tournaments such as Euro 2012.

ESPN will also make live online streaming available.

Some re-airings and highlights shows will also be broadcast on ABC, including re-airings of both singles finals.

“During the negotiation, it was abundantly clear that being live and bringing fans live matches was of paramount importance to both the All England Club and ESPN,” said ESPN’s senior director of programming and acquisitions Jason Bernstein in a conference call Tuesday.

“Given the expanded nature of social media, the immediate need of fans and the importance of the here and now, it is very difficult to ever imagine how we could take a world‑class event and deliver it on tape,” he later added.

The shift represents a somewhat ironic reversal of where the two entities stood on tape-delayed sports in 1979, the year of ESPN’s founding and the first year of NBC’s live coverage from the All-England Club, dubbed “Breakfast at Wimbledon” (a moniker that ESPN will reintroduce this year).

Conversely, in the developmental years of ESPN in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the network relied heavily on tape-delayed events to fill airtime. But as the network matured and began to understand the freedoms allowed by cable television, ESPN became known for its live coverage of sports from around the world, creating this reputation perhaps most famously with pioneering live coverage of the 1987 America’s Cup from Perth, Australia in 1987. ESPN has continued to broadcast live from the Australian Open, with matches often running through the night on the U.S. East Coast, from 7 p.m. until 8 the next morning.

But where ESPN was broadcasting live at all hours, NBC had maintained the use of tape delay for tennis as recently as last year, airing matches as crucial as men’s singles semifinals between Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray sometimes hours behind actuality, an outdated practice in an age of up-to-the-second updates through social media. To protect more lucrative programming such as “Today,” NBC also employed a strategy of starting matches at the same hour “in all time zones,” which meant that viewers in the Pacific Time Zone saw the matches three hours later than the already-delayed East Coast.

NBC has also been criticized for its broadcasts of the Olympics, which have relied heavily on tape delay.

NBC did not rely on any tape-delayed matches during its coverage of the French Open (the one Grand Slam event for which they retain any rights) in May, although the network did anger some fans by choosing to end coverage at the preordained stopping time instead of staying for the conclusion of a women’s singles match between Kaia Kanepi and Caroline Wozniacki that was at 5-2 in the third set.

“From my perspective I’d rather not make this an NBC or an ESPN thing as much as this is a fan thing,” Bernstein said. “Fans deserve live coverage, and we’re obviously honored to be a part of delivering live coverage here and in a way that it hasn’t been done before. And we think that whether the event is Wimbledon, the Australian Open or the Euro Championships, fans are way too smart and way too savvy to accept anything other than live.”