If you come from one of the cricket playing nations of the world - which makes cricket the worlds second most popular sport after football, or soccer, or whatever you call it, then you will know that the Cricket World Cup is being held in the wonderful West Indies.
Of course with Japan still living in the shadow of their defeat during World War II to the nuclear power of the Americans, baseball is very much the mainstream sport in these isles, so it is a tricky proposition to catch any of what is a very minority sport under the haze of American hegemony. One option of course is to vacate oneself to the delightful isles of the West Indies, although for the rest of us mere mortals the best option remains the internet.
Luckily there is another option - p2ptv. With the SopCast system installed, you will be able to watch not just the World Cup, but a wealth of other programming besides. And it is all free.
SopCast, according to their about us file is:
Sopcast Team built on Dec, 2004 and focus on the research and application on P2P streaming technology. The first website http://www.sopcast.org is very famous in China and many other countries, is linked and introduced by many aboard website especially in Europe . The sop protocols, developed by SopCast Team, has some specifications like security, high efficiency, extendable and make it easy to support huge users to view the online channels in a standalone server.
The question does arise over who gets what from this. I am sure that if this was based in a country of limited freedom, in the intellectual sense, then this would be closed down as fast as one could say “attack Egypt”, “attack Sweden” or “attack Oman” or whatever the current flavour of the month was. The advertisers certainly do benefit from this service. They get eyeballs on logos, brand recognition - everything they could dream for. The channels themselves dont get anything, unless they work it into their marketing plans (their ability to do so remains to be tested - getting ads for Indian insurance companies is wonderful, but I don’t really need their services living here in Japan).
If you want an interesting viewing platform download sopcast. If you thought this post was crap, then you probably want to stick to fox (and I am not going to do you the convenience of linking to them).
Enjoy the fours, sixes, and drunk kiwis in ridiculous costumes.
Apparently a round of the World Paragliding Championship 2007 was held in Ibaraki earlier this month. 122 gliders took part in the event which was held on Mt. Tsukuba which is close to where we live. This was the second time that a world championship paragliding event was held in Ibaraki.
Despite being introduced late in the nineteenth century by the British in Yokohama, cricket has never been a big thing in Japan. Baseball has always been more popular - probably as a result of the lower cerebral threshold required to play and watch the game.