Another similar program is PPLive (also primarily Chinese). From a technical perspective it's quite cool stuff (if you google around you can find papers on the implementation and how they deal with buffering, etc) and I'm surprised it hasn't taken off in the US sooner - a great example of China innovating in software (as opposed to the constant copying pointed out by others).

Sopcast is great for P2P streaming, but only works on Windows (or wine).

i used it on linux a couple of years ago to watch world cup (took a bit of fucking around)

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sop+player+linux

http://code.google.com/p/sopcast-player/

That's what you get with Chinese. I guess they just don't see the problem with that. But the underlying tech is very impressive.