Worldcup Preparations

The football world cup is starting today and it surely is going to be the biggest sports event of the year. We all know that some television channels are going to stream the world cup live on the Internet for their countrymen while others may only show the matches on television. If you are not that tech savvy and still want to view the cup online your best bet is to download a software called pplive. I suggest the stable version but experienced users could use the beta version as well.

Install pplive on your system, make sure you chose English as your language. The options should appear at first start and you can change some settings like ports, connections and the like. Click ok or hit enter to leave the options. Select Play from the menu and you see a channel list on the left, probably lots of garbage if you don't have the appropriate fonts installed on your system. But this does not matter.

The important channels are the following:

CCTV1, CCTV5 and probably Shanghai Sports

All three seem to be showing all games of the football world cup live. Take a look at the boxtobox website for a complete schedule of the games and which station is broadcasting it. (Update: no longer available)

I suggest you take a look at this tool if you can't watch a match on TV.

Update: Download the latest Tvuplayer version from Rapidshare and select the channel ESPN2, they show the games live and it's working. Downloads also available from Badango and Rapidsharing.

Update 2: I compiled a list of frequently asked questions that help you resolve issues that you may experience while you are using the product.

Update 3: If TVUplayer does not connect you have the option to download either TVants or Sopcast and watch the world cup or other sport events using those programs. (CCTV 5 is the channel, unfortunately with Chinese commentary)

Update 4: The world cup has ended, but since one is played every four years, you may come back to this article to get the latest information regarding the upcoming world cup. I'd like to point out a couple of changes that have taken place in the mean time.

Recently, live football streams have moved from being almost exclusively available in p2p video streaming applications like TVU Player or Sopcast to the world wide web. While you still find some matches using P2p software, you will find the majority of matches only on the web. Check out out list of football scheduling sites that list where you can watch the matches online.

Good news is, instead of installing a software to watch football or other sports, all you need now is a web browser and Flash to do so.

Update 5: TVU Player has been discontinued and we have removed all links pointing to it from this article.