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The time has finally come, for those starved of soccer since the last world cup, here is our bastion of hope, Euro 2008, occuring every four years, 2 years before each world cup. This trophy decides the best of Europe, the current champion is Greece, although this year, the favourites are Germany. In this article I will explore the options for the soccer (football) mad and how you can get your fix of live matches on the internet!
If you live in Australia like me, you will know that SBS is only broadcasting about 1 in 4 games live..... and the only option for pay-per-view style viewing is with Setanta Sports ($14.99 a month), now this is admittedly good value, and the quality is not bad too; they offer 300k and 450k streams. However, if you can't, or more likely if you are reading this, don't, want to pay for TV that is free in other countries, then read on! The best options are the established p2p TV Clients, they are; TVUPLayer by TVU Networks, TVAnts by Zhejiang University and SopCast. These three re-broadcasters/p2p streamer softwares will allow you to watch TV from all over the world (predominantly Asia and the US) and during special events, such as Euro2008, some live games. Sounds too good to be true, well it is, sort of... Some of the downsides to these 'free' services are: - legality, no-one can say for sure if it is OK to watch live TV from another region over the net.
- Quality, is not always the best and sports need to have clarity to be enjoyable.
- Availability, everything is not spelled out for you, you have to look for the channels, and sometimes they go 'off the air' for unknown reasons
- Language, most channels offered are in a foreign language, predominantly Chinese, so if you don't speak Chinese, it may feel strange listening to commentary in that language.
But hey, it is free, and with enough digging, a pretty good selection of TV can be found, absolutely FREE, Gratis, per nada! Most of these software packages have a little help, and support available in their respective forums, however, I have found a couple of good Euro 2008 specific channel finding websites, I have put them in the links of interest below.
If a game is in progress, you can watch in on TVU here! I have embedded the player below:
- Links of Interest -
Love Footy
Live Footy V 2.1
Euro 2008 Official Site
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