One of the things that I get a lot of emails asking about is "can you watch sports on PC TV?" This is something I've been researching this week, and I've got something to report on it.
I started by doing a lot of searching the web. And I looked into a number of products who promised I could watch sport on my PC. As I've mentioned previously on my site, there are a LOAD of really junk, rip-off products around when it comes to PC TV.
So what's the deal with watching sports on your PC? In places like the UK and the US, there's very little FREE sports on TV. Companies realized there was a fortune to be made with pay per view.
BUT there's a cool LEGAL loophole
Other countries that don't have PPV still broadcast sports channels for free. You can take advantage of the global nature of the web and watch those stations from wherever you live. And the good news is the programs are still broadcast in English.
I'm going to concentrate here on one of the best sports channels that's available to watch. You can get it using my number one recommendation for PC TV software: PC Show Buzz. It has a lot of different sports channels but the one I'm going to be using today is ESPN Star Sports.
Logging in to ESPN
1) Fire up PC Show Buzz. If you haven't got this software yet, you can read about and download it here:
2) Click on Channels By Genre on the left panel and then choose Sports.
3) Now you have to double click on ESPN Star Sports station in the right Channels area.
ESPN Star Sports is a really great sports channel that features Soccer, cricket, football, tennis, wrestling, and just about every other kind of sport you can think of. You can read more about it here.
By now the channel will be playing in PC Show Buzz - but we're just getting started. This is only the first part of what you need to know.
Finding out what's on and WHEN
Now we need to find out what's on ESPN Star Sports and WHEN so we can plan what we want to watch. The next step is to go to this link:
http://www.espnstar.com/tvtimes/tvtimes_index.jsp
This is the broadcast schedule for the ESPN channels. Now follow these steps.
1) For the country choose Singapore. The ESPN channel that's available for free on PC Show Buzz is from Singapore. Don't worry - it's in English. ;-)
2) OPTIONAL: You can choose a sport from the drop down menu from 'Select Types of Sports' if you want to. eg. Wrestling. To see all upcoming sports programs, leave this selection alone.
3) Now choose a date range that you'd like to see programming information for. You can choose to view times for today, tomorrow, the coming week or whatever you want. It's up to you.
4) Now click on View and you'll see the start times on the following pages. You can even download the listings or print them out. Remember the channel is ESPN Star Sports.
Time Zone Issues
The times shown are in Singapore time so you'll need to convert them to your time. There's a really easy tool on the web that will do this for you. It's also free.
http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc
Just enter your time and convert it to Singapore time and you'll be able to see when programs are coming on in your time.
This all sounds like a lot of work, but it's very easy once you try it.
Good luck and enjoy watching your sports!
