Internet TV is big news at the moment. It is being hyped as the
next big thing on the internet and it wasn’t long before people would
start to use it to watch football. This site aims to make it a
lot easier to find and watch you local team. There are currently
loads of sites offering football over the internet and this site hopes
to save you a lot of time and hassle.
I have tried many a time to watch my team (Liverpool FC) on a Saturday
afternoon without much joy or only to connect to live stream 5 minutes
before the end of the game. Sound familiar anyone?
There are a number of ways to watch football over the net and they fall
into two main categories, direct streams and peer to peer. The
problem with direct streams is that when they become busy it is
extremely difficult to connect to the stream. I am sure many of
you will agree with me on this one. Especially if you have tried
to connect on a Saturday afternoon!
Peer to peer (P2P) uses the same technology as Bit Torrent, Kazaa and
Napster to collect the TV stream from different sources. This
means that the more people that are watching the stream the better the
quality of the stream. Using a peer to peer application should
avoid the problems of trying to connect directly to a stream.
Most P2P applications run in the system tray and buffer the stream
before sending it to media player or other media software.
Obviously the quality of the channels vary depending on the number of
people who are sharing the stream. There are some pretty good
examples out there, try ESPN on Sopcast to see the quality.
The number of new P2P applications appears to increasing on an almost
weekly basis. The problem is that most of them are in Chinese and
with some you have to navigate through the website to find the
download. A couple of good examples I have used include PPLive
and Sopcast. Synacast has recently emerged and features a nice
English website but with no download link. There many others
about on the internet.
The future certainly appears to be bright for internet TV especially
with broadband speeds increasing all the time. P2P is definitely
the way to watch the football on the internet. Which application
works best is unknown at the moment so watch this space. It
certainly looks like being an interesting few months.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 31 October 2005 )
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