PC TV

This article describes the possibilities of PC TV, which simply means to watch tv on the pc. Have you encountered a situation like the following before? Great the next match of my favorite sports team will not be shown on free tv. Actually it will not be shown at all in my country, except for satellite of course. If you encounter situations like this one and always thought there would be no other solution than to watch boring live tickers on internet sites, then you have come to the right place that brings you the solution called PC TV.
I will describe three freeware programs

that let you connect to channels that stream tv and especially live sports events. This includes all major european football (soccer) leagues, champions league, uefa cup, espn, wrestling, national team matches, boxing matches aso.
You also find regular tv stations like mtv and custom stations like gamers tv there.

PC TV

All you need to watch pc tv is a computer with the latest windows media player and / or real player. A broadband connection is desired for best results. All three programs to watch pc tv have been produced in Asia making it hard to read the websites. Those websites offer tv program lists among other information.
First, let us take a look at some options in media player and real player:
Start the media player, make sure you use the latest version. Right-Click and select Options from the menu. Click on Performance and Change the Buffer Size of Content to 30 seconds.
In real player you select Tools -> Preferences and click on the General -> Playback Settings. The setting Buffer up to 30 seconds is at the bottom of this window.
Stream formats:
mms:// and .asx open with windows media player
rtsp:// and .rm / .ram open with real player
Starting Streams manually:
Sometimes you need to start streams manually. Use the stream formats information to figure out the program to use.
On windows media player choose File -> Open Url or the shortcut ctrl + u
On real player choose File -> Open

PC TV Programs

Sopcast

Download from the above link, unzip, start. A channel list will be displayed. Double-click a channel and windows media player should start and begin buffering and displaying.
Pplive

Just download and run the installation script on pplive. Its all in English, no need to worry. You need the pplive channel list for it, it does not come with a loaded list.
Ppstream

Download from the above location. This one has an installation script that is unfortunatly producing lots of gibberish. The buttons are designed like in every other windows installation script. (left button, choose a directory, 3x middle button). The Channel list is on the left, you see the channel name, the quality of the stream in Kb per second and the users connected to the channel.
If I had to choose one of them I?d defiantly choose ppStream which has the best interface and good user rates and a nice overall stream quality.
Popular PC TV Channels:

channel	content	language
CCTV5	european soccer, other sport events.	Asian ?
ESPN	All major us leagues, european soccer + more	English
Games Tv (ppstream)	professional game play, tournaments, mags	Asian ?
Soccer Demo	soccer	Asian ?
Sport Italia	Italian Sports Channel	Italians

Additional Information:
Live Football Streams Schedule
More P2P TV Tools:
Coolstreaming
QLive
TvAnts
Watching PC TV on your computer has never been easier than these days. Users can pick a wide variety of applications that bring pc tv to their computer without having to pay a dime.