Live Sport adds a football icon to the address bar. A click on the icon opens a menu after a few seconds with options to display live scores or live streams.

Live Streams are conveniently sorted by sport, with tabs available for football, tennis, hockey, basketball, baseball and Volleyball. It might feel a bit strange that American football is not on the list. The most likely reason is that it is sorted in the other category.

The other tab contains sports like Cricket, Rugby, Nascar table tennis or cycling among others.

A click on a category displays all matches for the particular time and day. Each match is listed with an icon that indicates the sport, the time it starts, the teams and a Video link. A click on a match row displays detailed information, including links to flash contents that stream the game live on the Internet. Some links may require registration before they become available, the majority do not.

A click on a link opens the live stream in a popup window or in a new browser tab in the Chrome web browser. It may take some time before the contents are displayed, and you will sometimes encounter errors like streams that do not exist anymore or cannot be loaded at that time.

The popular matches, especially football matches, usually offer multiple stream links so that it is easy to switch to another stream if one is not working correctly.

The stream quality ranges from barely viewable to excellent.

Live Scores are displayed for current, upcoming and finished games. There are options to view tables in leagues or tournaments, and to customize the selection to exclude sports or events from the display.

Live Score for Chrome makes it a lot easier to find live streams of sport matches and events. While it is possible to find those links on your own, it usually means lots of searching and testing before you find one that is working and streaming in good quality.

Chrome users can install Live Sport directly from the official Google Chrome Web Store.

Sopcast is an alternative. You can download the freeware from the developers website or use one of the mirrors to do so. The download from the main website did not work for me, not a good sign, and I had to use one of the mirrors to get the program. Sopcast offers free tv streams over internet using P2P technique which means that the quality not only depends on the source who is streaming the tv signal but also on the peers that share their bandwidth as well.

A pleasant suprise was that the website was completely translated to English, which is not the case for most other Sopcast-like-tools out there. Once installed you can login anonymously and click on channels to see the big channel list.

Channels are sorted into categories like Sports and HiFi Music. As you can see on the picture to the left there are some characters that are not displayed correctly, most likely because of missing Chinese language support on my system.

Clicking on a channel opens a new window to the right of the program that is connected to it. You receive some basic information about buffering, speed and which program you are viewing.

It normally takes some time to load. Just remember that the quality of the output not only depends on your connection speed but also on the connection speed of your peers.

The tv stream playback began quickly but the buffering was not done yet. It is normal to get some small interruptions during the first minutes of playback. This should stop once you are connected to more peers.

Sopcast does not have that many US channels like TVU Player. It offers ESPN, HBO Movie and CNN. There are probably more at different times in the day and some minor ones that I missed but it’s rather mediocre.

All the football fans should also take note of CCTV 5 which is a Chinese Sports channel broadcasting lots of European football. (that is soccer in North America)

Conclusion: If you like sports you may want to try out Sopcast and won’t miss tvu player that much. If you like movies and tv shows sopcast is not really the right tv streaming application to use.