There is a site out there - I won't tell you what it is but you can probably find it - that offers every just about every live sports game there is, whether or not the respective television networks have allowed it, whether or not the respective sports league have given express consent for rebroadcast, whether or not the sports game is only televised on Indonesian TV. I'd tell you what the site is, but I think it might be illegal, and besides, it's not like it's hard to find through Google.

But what's intriguing is the way in which these rebroadcasts are being done.

Similar to the Slingbox, end-users are using TV capture cards and simply streaming, through P2P technologies, the TV shows live from their home computers (with a slight delay) as they're broadcast. Unlike the slingbox, which is a device that controls your home TV and lets you change channels as you watch TV over the net, the service I'm referring to records only one channel. Interested in seeing another channel? Find a different user with a different TV and a different stream.

There's a certain similarity between this and other projects like Babelgum, Joost, and my personal favorite, the academic-only ACTLab.tv. And we've covered them before in this blog.

What makes this particularly interesting is that this is standard TV being encoded in real time into little bits and bytes, and illegally bypassing distribution restrictions.

For example, there are national distribution lines. I can't get BBC Three legally, no matter how much I like Torchwood, because I live in Texas. (Even the BBC's legal streaming service filters based on IP/location, so as not to tick off British taxpayers.)

There are also other distribution lines that we rarely think about. I can't get cable TV at work - not only is there no cable running to my office, but it would also be rather conspicuous to bring into the office, to set up, and to watch. ("Wait, how is Days of Our Lives relevant to network latency ping times?") But, with something like this illegal solution, (or the much more legal Slingbox) I could get live TV on my computer here. Or at least I could for about a day and a half before NetQoS IT had a strong talk with me about acceptable internet use policies.

Recreational network usage - especially video - has been a problem for IT departments. That's not news. What is news is that the idea of an always-on, streaming service for all live events, not just the ones lucky enough to be locally broadcasted. I mean, look at what happened when it became popular for other media - music and movies - to be copied illegally and shared via the Internet. There would be no iTunes without Napster, no Netflix OnDemand without the Pirate Bay. And just like an old cyberpunk novel from the eighties, illegal solutions where no legal solutions exist are a harbinger of a vast untapped demand. It may take a few years, but eventually someone comes along with a legal supply to answer that demand.

Live TV streaming isn't likely to go away. The good news, however, is that live TV streaming is distinctive as a traffic pattern - an anomaly detector with good baselines can, for example, pinpoint exactly when and where abnormal traffic usage is occurring. Unlike most viruses, streaming live video sticks to a schedule. No need for live TV when the Dodgers aren't playing.