Sopcast : Free internet TV

25. January 2007, 1:20 UhrVikas Sah

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sopcast I always had issues with how to share the videos of my son I shot and also how to watch a TV station which is not shown in U.S. P2P and Internet TV seem to be the answer.

Recently one of my friends pointed out a P2P software called Sopcast. It shows you free TV over the Internet and right now you can watch BBC World News, HBO Movies, ESPN Sports, Star Sports and many other channels.

SopCast is a simple, free way to broadcast video and audio or watch the video and listen to radio on the Internet. Adopting P2P(Peer-to-Peer) technology, It is very efficient and easy to use. Let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of a powerful server and vast bandwidth. You can build your own TV stations comparable with large commercial sites with minimal resources. Using SopCast, you can serve 10,000 online users with a personal computer and a home broadband connection.

I downloaded it and played around a bit. I liked the nice easy interface and the quality of the transmission. The neat thing is that I can start streaming my videos on a channel and give that channel to my family in India and they can (using Sopcast) watch our videos. This saved me tons of hassle of how to send such huge video files.

The software has been developed it seems in China, where it is very popular (one can guess from the amount of public channels that are Chinese) but is supposedly picking up in Europe. The tool uses a its own proprietary protocol called sop.

I personally think it is a great tool but it has to grow its reach among the English speaking countries more and it has to increase the number of English channels.

Here is a snapshot of the tool: (click to enlarge)