The American Idol executive producer, who flashes his extremely pearly whites in front of the camera as a judge on So You Think You Can Dance, announced he’s leaving the über-successful singing competition, which is heading into its eighth season on a ratings downswing despite still being the most watched show on TV.

“I will step back from my day-to-day producing work on American Idol and will be devoting my time” to a new development venture with 19 Entertainment head and fellow Idol mastermind Simon Fuller, Lythgoe said in a statement obtained Monday by E! News.

“Due to the huge success of So You Think You Can Dance, my summer will be taken up by travels to South Africa, Australia and Canada to work on local versions of the show,” the 59-year-old former dancer-choreographer said.

The deal, which encompasses TV, film and stage projects, was also confirmed by the company, with Fuller calling Lythgoe “the best producer I have ever worked with.”

Fox admitted that the network is “disappointed,” but they wished the Brit well—although no exec can be too happy about the shakeup, especially now that Idol needs to bust out the heavy artillery to avoid losing more than the 2.4 million weekly viewers the show has already dropped between 2007 and 2008.

One of my favorite free TV to watch on my PC is SopCast. It’s loaded with great channels and even has peer-to-peer technology to broadcast. The quality is great depending on your video card and internet connection. The buffer rate is fast even if there’s many concurrent users connected to a given channel. Fast buffering means smooth viewing with no delay in waiting for a stream to load.

SopCast also has a very nice list of TV channels such as sports, news, comedy, cartoons, movies, etc. Another great distinctive feature to the SopCast player is the VOD (Video on Demand) function. You can now select from a range of different movies and shows and it will play them from the beginning.

The other great feature to sopcast is that you can view pay-per-view broadcasts, such as major boxing events. The only draw back is that it may be in another language, but who cares I can translate the fight by just watching.

System Requirement

To run the SopCast Software, the following requirement is needed:

1. Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Linux. See details.

2. At least 64M System Memory, 128M System Memory is recommended.

3. At least 10MB of Harddisk space.

4. Install Microsoft Media Player 9.0 above RealPlayer or other media player which can play streaming.

Install and Uninstall

SopCast provides two kinds of programs, SopCast and Webplayer (ocx) plugin. SopCast include 3 components, SopPlayer, SopServer and WebPlay. SopPlayer for viewer, SopServer for broadcaster and WebPlayer for web viewer.

Are you excited yet? Visit SopCast and download this awesome client today.