P2PTV - Watch your favorite sport, movie, program online

No more cribbing when you are abroad in a country which does not speak your language, no more missing your favorite programs, movies or sporting event. Wow now thats music to the ears of people like me who stay abroad and miss watching some nice programs or movies or sports.
Peer-to-Peer technology or p2p makes this possible. So all you need is a p2p software application which helps in redistributing video streams on a p2p network.

Is this something similar to bit-torrent.....

The answer is NO. p2pTV is not the old method of downloading movies, dvds, tv episodes by using bit-torrent or edonkey or other file sharing network, and then watch the videos after completing the download. Nor it’s downloaded short video clips through shoutcast, etc.

Does it cost me something.....

Once again NO (now this is wonderful is it not :)) p2pTV is a freeware or a free software which enables you to watch video streams, including live tv channels from pay cable or satellite tv. Potentially any or every channel in the world can be viewed.

So how does the p2pTV Technology work.....

This does not work the way normal video streaming works, where all the viewers connect to the streaming server, creating congestion on the server, this slowing the speed of viewing considerably.
With p2pTV technology, only few users need to connect to the main streaming server and each users themselves become a streaming server that broadcasts to other peer while at the same time receiving the streaming video from other peer’s streaming server. This greatly reduces the burden on main video streams hosting server, and increases the sources where the media can be streamed from. Thus, the download speed will be higher, and so do smoothness of media playing. Simply saying it works by the age old saying 'Teamwork is the best way to work' so instead off one server, multiple PC's team up and help in the streaming process.

What is the system requirements....

Each software specifies their own requirement, but a general rule of thumb for best streaming quality would be to have at least the following:

At least 1,500 Kbps download speed
Windows Media Player 9 and/or Real Player
Disable Windows XP Service Pack 2 TCP Connection Limit

What are the available p2pTV applications......

TvAnts
ppStream
PPLive
Cybersky-TV
Feidian
PeerCast
Octoshape
Open Media Network
QQLive
Tvkoo

Any issues....

One of the main concern would be copyright. In these free p2p-tv networks, you can find numerous entertainments, news, and sports channels from cable and satellite TV stations. The quality of the streaming video also varies especially on those networks with fewer users. Lagging or intermittent delay and disconnection of video stream is not uncommon.