Some, like LastFM, offer a comprehensive service in which you have a profile and can interact with other lastFM users. Bands can be commented on and reviewed and based on your listening habits new bands will be suggested to you.

The latest start-up to cause the biggest buzz has been Muxtape, a highly minimal music may upload only 12 songs to their ‘muxtape’. It’s a struggle to condense your entire collection into just a dozen songs, but what it does do is guarantee the quality of people’s muxtapes.

In fact it would be a great way to discover new songs, except that a search function is not included in the service. Luckily someone else started up MuxSearch recently.

If you like these minimal song sharing services then why not try Tiny Song? First simply search for the song, select it from the list it suggests. From here you can send the link to a friend to listen to.

The link will open the song up in Grooveshark and begin streaming instantly. You’ll find it sure beats telling someone to go download a song, then having to download it for them when they can’t find it, then having them not like it anyway.

Forget feature filled startups, these are the way to go.

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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.

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