Tvants has been around for a while and it's now on version 1.0.0.57 but has always been in the shadow of pplive. Now that the channel availability and quality of pplive has gone downhill, I thought I'd bring to your attention this very capable streaming software.

The channel list includes Guangdong, Shanghai, dragon tv, cctv5, cctv football, goal tv 1 and 2, bandsports, roma uno and ESPN with English commentary. The quality is usually good with buffering times slightly higher than most other streaming programs.

As far as I can see, there are two reasons why Tvants has not become more popular. The first is that users may not be getting a channel list after installation. There is only one default server after a fresh installation, that's www.tvants.com, and it's not always available. Make sure you add fanshoptv.no-ip.info to the server list.

The second and more important reason is that whenever you use Tvants, your uploads are usually higher than your downloads. This suggest to me that users are not opening their ports for other users to connect to. This is crucial because this software is built around bit-torrent technology and in order to get a steady stream, every client must make sure other users can connect to them.

You can find out what port you should open by going to Tools>Settings, then the Share tab, the number next to Listen port base is the port you need to open in your firewall.