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The following is a sponsored review of luxury Watch Straps which are available online at Watchband.biz.

Based in Germany, Watchband.biz has an excellent selection of high-end replacement watch straps that fit most major luxury watch manufacturers’ watches, and will ship your luxury watch strap anywhere in the world. Watchband.biz offers straps made out of many different materials, including alligator, crocodile, lizard, and ostrich, meaning that their products are probably not on any PETA endorsement lists, but also that you’re getting a seriously hoity-toity strap you can show around the country club, where no one gives a damn what PETA thinks.

The straps themselves are certainly not cheap–some range up to $200 and higher–but they certainly do look beautiful on the site. The searching is intuitive, and there’s a list of watch manufacturers that links to corresponding strap models available for each watch. One of the more interesting (and moderately priced) straps on the site (pictured above) is made of shark skin, and retails for $34.20.

The return policy and warranty for the straps in indicated clearly on the site, but is only 14 days. Any ‘obvious’ defects in the strap must be emailed to the company within 14 days after receipt of the strap in order for it to be replaced or returned. In other words, if it arrives damaged, it’s covered, but after that it’s your fault if it gets damaged. Obviously, with a product like a watch strap, the potential for customer abuse is significant, but I would like to see a slightly longer grace period on returns, especially for straps with a $200 price tag.

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The temporary flaw in ESPN360.com’s security, which was fixed on Monday night, might have temporarily dissuaded some from the notion that they could watch their beloved teams compete in the World Cup online. Thankfully, a company in China has a much better notion: P2P TV channel streaming.

TVUNetworks, based in Shanghai, has a beta download of their TVUPlayer available on their website, www.tvunetworks.com. The player works in a simple, yet ingenious way. Utilizing concept similar to that employed in peer-to-peer downloading software such as Kazaa, TVUPlayer streams the TV channel to you from another user who is running the software, and in turn utilizes your extra available bandwidth to serve the video stream to others. The result: no matter how many people connect, the video plays smoothly, with little to no lag. Quality’s not the greatest, but it’s free, and you’re probably at work, so it beats the hell out of nothing at all. To give an idea of how effective this is, consider that the download of the software (from TVUNetworks‘ servers) is currently proceeding at a mere 8-9kBps on most people’s computers, probably as a result of high demand from World Cup viewers. The streams, however, run great, and often actually improve in quality as the number of viewers increases.

TVU is currently trying to secure contracts with TV channels to broadcast through the TVUPlayer, but until then, bless their hearts, they’re just offering a bunch of streams for free. In addition to the ESPN and ESPN2 available, there’s CNN and some other (often international) channels. Kind of makes ESPN 360 obsolete…