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I don’t have much on my mind today. I spent this morning and this afternoon at work, and then when I got home I cleaned the three bathrooms in the house in meticulous fashion. This is the first time its been done for months, so it was no easy task, I’ll assure you.

Today’s blog is more of a reflection of a conversation that I had with a friend the other night. He was looking into betting for the first time, and had come across a number of schemes where you sign up to win free bets at a website, then bet the opposite to happen on another website, thus neutralising any profit but winning yourself a free £25 bet or whatever. Nice, sure, but you need capital, lots of betting accounts and patience as well.

My two betting avenues of choice have always been Roulette and Football accumulators.

Roulette I’m so-so at. It’s a game of probability and I spend most my time covering as many numbers as possible (often only leaving 2 or 3 uncovered) so that I have 33 or 34 numbers of the 36 covered. You win hardly anything, maybe 50p each spin, but at the same time you’re very unlikely to lose (although it is soul destroying when it happens! and takes a long while to reaccumulate everything).

Football accumulators on the other hand, are something which I’ve been doing for a few years, and I usually make a fair bit of money. There was a point last year when I had a 25-bet accumulator, with ridiculous odds, and my 20p bet would have returned somewhere in the region of £5,000. 23 teams won and two of them drew (Roma at home to Ascoli, and York City at home to Forest Green). Unlucky, I know, but my smaller accumulators are always coming off!

Football betting is pretty easy if you have a bit of knowledge and you do a bit of research (previous meetings and league standings). Betting on Man Utd to beat Derby is almost pointless, I mean it’s almost certainly going to happen but betting a fiver on it might only return six quid, if you’re lucky. Is it worth risking so much just for a 20% profit or less? Probably not.

However, couple Man United with say, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Barcelona and Real Madrid to win (and more often than not they all win each weekend) and betting five quid on that could return anywhere between £10 and £20 (I’d reckon around £15). So you more than double your money.

Accumulators on favourites is easy money. Of course, favourites don’t always win (see Liverpool this weekend drawing away to Birmingham, or Arsenal’s numerous draws at home in the past few months). You need to be good at picking out the dead certs, but if you can, and believe me there are much more than five or six every weekend (there’s five or six every day in fact) then you can make a pretty penny doing this.

The other night for example, I bet £5 on Flamengo, Sao Paulo and Nacional all of Brazil to win at their home grounds. They were all favourites, and they all won comfortably, earning me £10.50. The same night, I had also bet £5 on Thisted, OB Odense and Hajduk Split to win their home games, a bet which won me just short of £10 as well. So that’s £20 made in a night without even leaving my house.

Sure, £20 is nothing, but like I said if you pick out these bets on a daily basis you can make money like that every day. Do the math, say you place an accumulator-a-day with the chance to earn either £10 or £20 then if five of them come off a week (they won’t all win, they never do) then you’re anywhere between £50 to £100 up each week. And who couldn’t do with £50 to £100 tax-free every week? I must confess I don’t quite make this much, because I bet much smaller amounts, but winning 5 accumulators a week is a regular occurance to be honest.

Football happens across the world on a daily basis. Most people associate it with Saturdays and Sundays and those are the days that your accumulators really do come in to play. I do much bigger accumulators on a weekend, but they rarely come off. However, during the week, you’ll often have European or Continental fixtures on a Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, Scandinavian leagues often play on Mondays, lower league games are often scattered throughout the week, and random foreign leagues crop up every day. Every single day you can be presented with as many as fifty to a hundred bets, or as little as five. But there’s always options.

Then comes picking out your favourites. The odds are always an indicator of who is going to be walking away victorious, and the more shrewd the odd (1/4 for example) the better they are for your accumulator. As I look at tomorrow’s games (Monday 28th of April) I see that an Arsenal away win is 1/4, and in all fairness, is more than likely going to happen. If I couple this with a Djurgarden home win (3/10 - something I fancy because the away team are at 9/1) and a AaB Aalborg home win (1/2 for one of Denmark’s best teams) I will win £2.43 for every £1 that I put on, well over double my money. If I throw in IFK Gothenburg, one of Sweden’s better teams, to win at home (2/5) and also West Brom (8/15), title chasing in the Championship, to win against lowly Southampton, fighting for their lives, then I will no win £5.23 for every £1 that I bet. I don’t need to tell you that if I bet £5 on this one I’m walking away with £26.
AAB AALBORG v AC Horsens
GOTHENBURG v Sundsvall
DJURGARDEN v Ljungskile
WEST BROM v Southampton
Derby v ARSENAL

On paper I fancy that bet, but at the same time I’m always wary about including too many teams. One game out of five will almost certainly go against the run of play.

A quick look at the league standings, coupled with the odds, should tell you that they’re all relatively safe bets. Although I wouldn’t throw a fiver at it everytime the return looks good. Remember, you’re trying to pick out DEAD CERTS rather than likely games, but I still don’t think that’s a bad accumulator at all.

South American games often run throughout the week, and most weeks if Boca Juniors or River Plate are at home then put your money on them. Same can be said for the top teams in Brazil (just look at the league table). Away wins in South American are MUCH, MUCH rarer than we’re accustomed to in Europe. Seriously, you’re talking maybe one or two in ten games ends in an away win. The continents are much bigger so traveling is a factor, as are the different environments… we don’t need to get into it. Basically, if a top South American team is at HOME then they’re relatively safe (Boca, River Plate, Flamengo, Corinthians, Santos, Sao Paulo, etc.).

Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV are good bets in Dutch football. Bayern Munich will win most of the team, especially at home, in German football. Dynamo Kiev & Shakthar Donetsk rarely lose in the Ukraine. Porto, Sporting Lisbon and Benfica usually win home or away in Portugal. Fenerbache & Galatasary are the same in Turkey, as are Panathinaikos & Olympiakos in Greece. Rosenborg are a ridiculously safe bet in Norway, as are FC Copenhagen in Denmark to name just a few. Like I say, a quick look at the league tables will show you the teams that win 30 out of 38 games a season, and those are the teams that win home and away. So pick out the best three or four and you can often win £2 or £3, maybe more, for every single £1 you bet. Relatively easy money.

You can make killings at the start of the season especially on UEFA Cup day, where Tottenham will get drawn against some random Bulgarian team without a hope in hells chance, on the same night that Lazio host a team from the Faroe Islands. Find a few of these and you can make yourself a shit load of money. The same can be said for the FA Cup and any domestic cup competition across the globe. If giants get drawn against minnows you’ve found some pretty easy dead certs.

However, there are a few things to bare in mind;
1. Don’t bet on a team after they’ve played in Europe because more often than not they’ll stumble regardless of whether they’re at home or not. The other team might have had twice the amount of time to prepare, they have had more rest and generally these are when the upsets occur.
2. Don’t bet on ridiculously low divisions (for example, League Two or the conference in England because these are leagues where anybody can beat anybody for a number of reasons)
3. Top of the league v Bottom of the league often has an unpredictable outcome. You don’t need me to explain why, but you’ll often see teams in the relegation places pull off victories against teams top of the table who get complacent.
4. Don’t think that just because FC Copenhagen are top in Denmark that it’ll be a walk in the park against teams at the foot of the table. FC Copenhagen, realistically, are nowhere near the standard of the British Premiership or the other top continental leagues. When they have a bad day they don’t have the quality in the team to reverse the problem, so betting on lower quality leagues can often lead to bizarre results too.
5. Never EVER bet on derby games. I don’t care if Everton are bottom of the league and Liverpool are top, unbeaten all season, the form book goes out of the window and all the players up their game. Derby games are always too close to call, regardless of what standard and what competition. Just don’t do it.

With that being said, teams are made favourites for a reason. You just need to pick the right favourites for your accumulators and you can triple your money, and then some. It’s a piece of piss really. Just look at today… Roma won at home, so did Inter Milan and Juventus, AC Milan won away, Real Madrid are winning as I type this, Bayern Munich won at home, FC Porto won emphatically, River Plate won 4-2 at home… and they were all games that I would have called to be honest. 8 easy favourites there. Hell, a fiver on that probably would have returned somewhere in the region of £50-60.

There isn’t long left of the footballing season, but still, if you know a bit about football then why not make a bit of money from it?

A few months back I wrote some short guides on downloading music/movies and things through torrents, and also a short guide on how to watch sports/TV online – now I’m going to teach you how to steal videos from youtube. “Why would I want to do that?” You might ask – well just in case you see something you like on youtube that you don’t want to have to search for every time you want to watch it, or so that you can put them on your ipod or phone or whatever…

First things first, go to youtube… http://www.youtube.com

Find the video you want – for the purpose of this guide we’re going to be stealing this random video of two guys pretending to be Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior, because it makes me chuckle…

At the search engine near the top of the page type in what you’re looking for, in this case – “hulk Hogan and ultimate warrior compilation” – then hit search…

Look through the search results for the video you’re after, once you’ve found it click on the title and it’ll take you through to the video.

Which should bring you to this screen. If it does, look to the right of the screen where I’ve circled for a box that says URL next to it. In here should be the address of the video, in this case http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlM3B2XxLls. Highlight the address and copy it.

Now go to keepvid.com. It should look something like this.

Inside the area I’ve circled (the green box near the top of the page), paste the address that you’ve just copied (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlM3B2XxLls). Once you’ve done that, click download to the right of the box.

Scroll down a little bit and you should see the “Download” box. As soon as you the download button from the previous instruction this new box should come up. Right click on the bit of text I’ve underlined, it should say “Download Link”. Right click and then press Save Target As.

Save the file somewhere memorable and rename it. When you rename it make sure you save it as FILENAME.FLV. This is very important. Stick whatever name you want in, but make sure you put .flv on the end. Once more, .flv on the end. What are you putting on the end? Yes, .flv, that’s correct. So hulkhogan.flv and then click save.

Now you’ve got the video saved on your computer, but it’s in a dodgy file you can’t play… SO…

Now, you need to download a program called SUPER from erightsoft.com. SUPER stands for Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer – it’s completely free and better than programs you would usually pay for. It will turn this dodgy .flv file into one that you can play in Windows Media Player or any other program.

To download SUPER, click here . Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for…

Right click on any of the four files and save it. Once it’s downloaded, install SUPER wherever you want – but make sure you put a shortcut on your desktop.

Once it’s installed, start it up. It should look something like this…

There’s a lot of buttons and menus but don’t get lost in all of those. They’re not really that important. Right click in the big grey box near the bottom of SUPER and it should bring up this list. Click “Add Multimedia File(s)” which should be at the top of the list…

Now find “Hulk Hogan” or whatever video you saved. And click Open.

You need to decide what you want to save it as. In the top left corner there’s a little drop down menu that says “Output Controller”. It brings up LOADS of options, but you most likely want .mp4, .avi or .wmv. If you just want the audio (say if you want the song from a music video, or something) then .mp3 or .wma are what you want here. There’s also options for iPods, PSPs, Phones and Nintendo DS’s. It depends what you want. We’re going to save this video as an mp4 – so it’ll play in real player, quicktime and itunes.

Now back to the bottom of SUPER. You should see this…

You’ve added your file to the box and you’ve decided what you want to save it as, all that’s left is to press “Encode” and sit back and wait.

The progress bar comes up here…

Once that’s done all you need to do is find your video. By default, it will be saved in C:\ Program Files \ eRightSoft \ Super \ Output … and then whatever you saved it as. You can change where you save it by right clicking in SUPER and there’s an output option in the menu.

This also works with Myspace vids, Google vids, Youtube vids on people’s blogs, etc. All you need to do is find the URL (address of the video) which you can usually do by right clicking, or sometimes like with youtube its beside the video anyway. Just copy the address into KeepVid.com and you’re on your way.

Give me an e-mail if you’ve any questions.

On Friday, ‘blogebrity’ Tony Pierce revisted something he wrote 3 years ago, a famous bit of blog-age entitled “how to blog”. It’s currently the #1 result when you type “how to blog” into google, and for reasons that can’t be explained I find it such a motivating/liberating piece of writing. I remember when he wrote it three years ago (back when I simply read blogs, rather than wrote my own) and its every bit as relevant now as it was then.

A lot of people want to write. And back in 2004, before the blog explosion really started - tonypierce had wise words for everyone who wanted to be part of what is now tediously known as the ‘blogosphere’.

So, courtesy of Tony Pierce’s busblog, a guide on how to blog…

how to blog by tony pierce, 110

1. write every day.

2. if you think youre a good writer, write twice a day.

3. dont be afraid to do anything. infact if youre afraid of something, do it. then do it again. and again.

4. cuss like a sailor.

5. dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you’d rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy.

6. have comments. dont be upset if no one writes in your comments for a long time. eventually they’ll write in there. if people start acting mean in your comments, ask them to stop, they probably will.

7. have an email address clearly displayed on your blog. sometimes people want to tell you that you rock in private.

8. dont worry very much about the design of your blog. image is a fakeout.

9. use Blogger. it’s easy, it’s free; and because they are owned by Google, your blog will get spidered better, you will show up in more search results, and more people will end up at your blog. besides, all the other blogging software & alternatives pretty much suck.

10. use spellcheck unless youre completely totally keeping it real. but even then you might want to use it if you think you wrote something really good.

11. say exactly what you want to say no matter what it looks like on the screen. then say something else. then keep going. and when youre done, re-read it, and edit it and hit publish and forget about it.

12. link like crazy. link anyone who links you, link your favorites, link your friends. dont be a prude. linking is what seperates bloggers from apes. and especially link if you’re trying to prove a point and someone else said it first. it lends credibility even if youre full of shit.

13. if you havent written about sex, religion, and politics in a week youre probably playing it too safe, which means you probably fucked up on #5, in which case start a second blog and keep your big mouth shut about it this time.

14. remember: nobody cares which N*Sync member you are, what State you are, which Party of Five kid you are, or which Weezer song you are. the second you put one of those things on your blog you need to delete your blog and try out for the marching band. similarilly, nobody gives a shit what the weather is like in your town, nobody wants you to change their cursor into a butterfly, nobody wants to vote on whether your blog is hot or not, and nobody gives a rat ass what song youre listening to. write something Real for you, about you, every day.

15. dont be afraid if you think something has been said before. it has. and better. big whoop. say it anyway using your own words as honestly as you can. just let it out.

16. get Site Meter and make it available for everyone to see. if you’re embarrassed that not a lot of people are clicking over to your page, dont be embarrassed by the number, be embarrassed that you actually give a crap about hits to your gay blog. it really is just a blog. and hits really dont mean anything. you want Site Meter, though, to see who is linking you so you can thank them and so you can link them back. similarilly, use Technorati, but dont obsess. write.

17. people like pictures. use them. save them to your own server. or use Blogger’s free service. if you dont know how to do it, learn. also get a Buzznet account. several things will happen once you start blogging, one of them is you will learn new things. thats a good thing.

18. before you hit Save as Draft or Publish Post, select all and copy your masterpiece. you are using a computer and the internet, shit can happen. no need to lose a good post.

19. push the envelope in what youre writing about and how youre saying it. be more and more honest. get to the root of things. start at the root of things and get deeper. dig. think out loud. keep typing. keep going. eventually you’ll find a little treasure chest. every time you blog this can happen if you let it.

20. change your style. mimic people. write beautiful lies. dream in public. kiss and tell. finger and tell. cry scream fight sing fuck and dont be afraid to be funny. the easiest thing to do is whine when you write. dont be lazy. audblog at least once a week.

21. write open letters. make lists. call people out on their bullshit. lead by example. invent and reinvent yourself. start by writing about what happened to you today. for example today i told a hot girl how wonderfully hot she is.

22. when in doubt review something. theres not enough reviews on blogs. review a movie you just saw, a tv show, a cd, a kiss you just got, a restaurant, a hike you just took, anything.

23. constantly write about the town that you live in.

24. out yourself. tell your secrets. you can always delete them later.

25. dont use your real name. dont write about your work unless you dont care about getting fired.

26. dont be afraid to come across as an asswipe. own your asswipeness.

27. nobody likes poems. dont put your poems on your blog. not even if theyre incredible. especially if theyre incredible. odds are theyre not incredible. bad poems are funny sometimes though, so fine, put your dumb poems on there. whatever.

28. tell us about your friends.

29. dont apologize about not blogging. nobody cares. just start blogging again.

30. read tons of blogs and leave nice comments.

I read this list back on friday and it really is a reminder of just how liberating it is to be able to write whatever you want on this little space on the interweb. And furthermore it’s a reminder that you’re doing it for yourself… not for traffic, not for anybody but yourself.

For anybody that wants to start writing, I’d recommend taking a look at this list and to remind yourself that you have views on politics, on religion, on sex, on your friends, on where you live… you’ve got opinions on everything. Write them. Get passionate about them. Read other people’s opinions. Argue with them, agree with them.

‘Blogs’ are fun, expressive mediums in a world where you seem less able to exercise free speech with each passing day. Get involved.

I’ve spent all of today in the university library writing an essay on the iPod and the culture of mobile listening. And I’ve found a nice article, courtesy of Curtin University (wherever the hell that is?), on harvard referencing which I would like to share. Every once in a while I get asked about referencing essays by friends or people in my class or whoever, and I’m sure that hundreds of students get it wrong on a daily basis. I certainly haven’t met anyone who knows harvard referencing inside out (I know how to do books, journals and articles off the top of my head, but after that I have no idea).

So if you would look to download this magical guide, click here. It should really be issued to every student on their first day at school, it’s just that good.

(Pretty boring update, huh? Well hopefully somebody reading will find it as useful as I have.)

After writing my guide to watching sports online I thought I’d write another one. It’s been a while since I’ve posted a round up of the week’s TV and links to download them because I was planning to write this guide (eventually).

I always get asked how to get hold of movies, music, tv and all these types of things on the net. It’s actually VERY easy.

To do it we use things called torrents. A torrent is a tiny little file, smaller than a word document, but it allows you to download whatever you’re after from other people.

You have to have a program to make use of torrents. There are plenty of programs out there, such as BitTorrent, but the one you’re going to learn (because it’s the one I use) is called Azureus. It’s great. You can download Azureus by clicking here. Bookmark http://azureus.sourceforge.net too for future updates.

Download it.

Now install it.

Open it up.

Make sure your firewall is set to allow Azureus.

You should then see this screen…

Do you see it? Good. Now onto the next step.

Now you need to find your torrent. For this guide we’re going to be looking for an episode of Lost. Season 3, Episode 19. Now we head over to a torrent website and search for Lost. We’ll use TorrentSpy.com, but also worth using are MiniNova.org, Pirate Bay, Iso Hunt and a whole host of others that you’ll become familiar with very quickly. Head to Torrentspy.com and there’s a search bar at the top. Enter “Lost” and this is what you’ll see.

Lots and lots of different things come up for Lost. Not all of them are what we’re after. Some are season 2, some are season 3, etc. We’re looking for Episode 19 of Season 3. So we need to look for S03E19 (Season03Episode19 if you will).

Ok good. There might be a few choices. Now we come onto things called Seeds and Leechers. This will help you get files faster.

Imagine a Seed as a party host, and a Leecher as people attending a party. The best party would be the one with the most hosts and guests, right? So if you see 5 seeds and 80 leechers you know you shouldn’t have many problems downloading whatever you’re looking for. If there’s 1 seed and 0 leechers you know it’s a pretty shit party… but if there’s nothing better on, it’ll do. What 5 seeds/80 leechers means is there’s 5 people sharing what you’re after and 80 people downloading from these 5 (but also 80 people sharing a small amount at the same time) whereas if there’s 1 seed/0 leechers there’s 1 person sharing and nobody else. If that 1 person decides to go offline, or has a crap internet, then you’re not going to get your movie/album/whatever very fast.

I hope that makes sense.

Also. Green means healthy (no trouble downloading). Yellow/Amber means its ok. Red means unhealthy (will struggle to download).

Now that you’ve found the torrent you want, with the right seeds/leechers click on it. And you’ll get its information…

Make sure to check the language (you don’t want to get Lost in Italian if you can’t speak it, do you?) and sometimes its worth checking “Comments” by scrolling down. If its not what it says it is (I remember once I spent ages downloading Rush Hour 2, and it turned out to be “A Knights Tale”… I was pissed) then people will leave comments saying so.

Now click Download. Save it wherever.

Open the torrent in Azureus by pressing the following button.

Then it should be added to your list… (yes, I’m downloading Mariah Carey’s discography, and no, I’m not embarassed by that… although I probably should be)

Yes?

Now lets examine some of the columns and things.

Done - obviously tells you how much of the file you’ve downloaded.
Status - if you’re waiting for the download to start and it’s set on ‘Stopped’ or ‘Queued’ then this is where you’ll see. Right click to stop/start/force it to start/etc.
Seeds - what we talked about earlier… the amount of people sharing the file(s)
Peers - the amount of people downloading the file from the ‘Seeds’

Download Speed - how fast it’s downloading
Upload Speed - how fast it’s uploading (this is you sharing it with others)
ETA - how long left until it’s downloaded…….

Once its done the file will appear in the circled section.

To clear it right click.

Then go down to Remove… torrent only. Right clicking on a torrent gives you loads of options. Which you’ll come to get used to the more you use them.

Now that you’ve cleared the file go and find it wherever you saved it.

Ta da!

Now you can watch Lost in Windows Media Player or whatever.

It’s the same process for movies, music, books, games, porn… whatever! It’s really that easy. Just make sure you get a good amount of seeds (a green bar if possible), you make sure the torrent is what you’re after and you read the comments so you don’t spend 6 hours only to realise you’ve got to watch the season finale of Lost in german!

As a rough guide, hour long TV shows should be about 350mb, movies should be between 700mb-1gb, albums should be between 40mb-100mb and games should be around 1gb or more too.

Mininova.org and Torrentspy.com are the sites I recommend.

Now go try it out.

Some of us (students at uni, mainly) aren’t lucky enough to have satellite TV. On the internet though you can find endless amounts of things to watch, and most of the time you can find streams of other TV channels from across the world. This comes in handy particularly when you can’t get to a bar or a satellite TV for a particular sporting occassion. Hopefully, with this guide, that should be less of a problem from now on. I’m going to show you how to watch football, basketball, american football, ice hockey, tennis and a whole host of other stuff on the net - and its completely free.

First you need your program. Download SopCast (also known as Pcast) by clicking HERE. Also, bookmark www.sopcast.com because you might need to download it again, or update it, and I think it has some TV guides and stuff on there too.

Wait for it to download.

Install it.

Now load up SopCast. Make sure your firewall allows it to access the net. Now you should see this screen…

Click login. It’s the area circled in red.

Now you should see this… when you do click the channels tab

And you should be presented with this…

I feel at this point its important that you know MOST of these channels are of oriental/far eastern origin. Some of them are in chinese. But if you know what you’re looking for, then it’s likely it’ll be in english. But if you’re just flicking through channels you’ll come across a lot of chinese broadcasts. If you can’t speak chinese don’t be alarmed, we’ll come onto how/when to watch games later. So this is the screen where you select the channels. At the top of the list is the sports channels (the primary use for SopCast, I think) but if you scroll down the list you’ll see there’s PLENTY of other stuff from movies to bbc/american tv channels.

When you’ve decided what you want to watch, double click the name. Then the video window should pop out like so…

This video window is where your programme will come up. It will take a minute or two to buffer your programme. And it won’t start smoothly. But if you leave it for a while then it’ll get going, and should be fairly smooth.

Taking a closer look at the video window…

You can see at the bottom left there’s a stop/play button, a volume button and information on buffering. Don’t expect the broadcast to come up until you’re in the 90%s (and that could take a few minutes).

Then you’ve got a whole host of buttons… in the top right…

From left to right;
- The first button hides the channels screen, so that you can watch the broadcast without the list of channels there. Click it again and it brings the channels back.
- The second button is for zoom. It’ll double the size of the screen when you click it, and return it to normal when you click it again.
- The third button adds the channel you’re watching to your ‘favourites’ so you can find it easier in the future.
- The fourth button allows you to record what you’re watching.
- The fifth and final button hides the video screen.

Then in the bottom right…

From left to right again;
- The first button refreshes the picture, so if your broadcast stops press this little button and it’ll restart it again. This can be pretty useful as some of the broadcasts are very stop-start.
- The second button. Well. I don’t know what this does. I don’t use it. I guess ‘FS’ stands for fucking shit. So don’t use this button. Something fucking shit might happen.
- The third button is pretty useful. It loads up what you’re watching in windows media player or whatever you use as default to watch videos (or .wmvs). So if you don’t like the size of the windows, or you just don’t like the video window, you can put the stream in windows media player by clicking this button. When you exit windows media player it’ll go back into the video window! So it’s pretty useful.

Right. Now you need to know where you find out about programmes.

Well, it depends what you want to watch. SopCast pretty much covers everything. And I mean everything. It covers the most random and far-away games of football (or soccer) that you can think of. Most weekends they cover Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Inter Milan, Bayern Munich, Porto (the list goes on… pretty much every major team in Europe). As well as games in South America, North America, Asia, Africa, Australia… seriously. If the game’s on and is of relative interest to the media, then there’s a strong chance you can find it on SopCast. The BEST place for football match listings is the forums of Football4Less, as well as FreeFootball.org, asiaplatetv and MyP2P. Once you’ve found the game, it’s as simple as loading up that channel in the channels list when the game is on. Football4Less is the place to look if you want an obscure game (you’ll have to register) but the other sites cover the major games of the day.

AsiaplateTV and MyP2P are good for NBA, NFL, NHL and Tennis. As an example of the coverage of these sports, they’re covering EVERY NBA playoff game. So that’s 3 or 4 games a day, every day of the week. Like I say, it’s just a case of finding the right channel.

On AsiaplateTV and MyP2P you don’t even have to load SopCast up, you can just find what you’re after and click “Play” under the SopCast column… and it’ll bring it up automatically.

You can even google SopCast TV guide and there’s a strong chance you’ll find a guide to movies, TV shows, etc.

It’s easy once you get used to it. They cover so much sport every day it would be a shame not to share it. Hope this guide has been useful. There’s a host of other similar programs, but SopCast is by far the most user-friendly (and has the best channels as far as I’m concerned). Enjoy!