Super Bowl Sunday and the world of the Internet

I’m thinking Football today. Even if my team isn’t in the game, it should be a fun match to watch. This year, projections are estimating around 110 Million people, in the US, to watch the game. That would be one out of three US citizens will be tuned in. This is unreal!

Over the past couple of years, the NFL has also been experimenting with online content. A couple of years ago, NBC and the NFL reached an agreement to offer simulcast over the web for Sunday Night Football. In my opinion, it’s very well done. Everything is in HD and controlled in a Flash application. You can control which camera you want to view, whether it be the blimp over head cam, sideline, wire, or broadcast view. It adds an exciting new element to the way the game is watched.

http://www.nfl.com/snf/landing

For select games, you can also watch the game on your mobile device. I believe these are for Thursday night games only offered on the NFL Network.

http://www.mobiledia.com/news/67260.html

These new ways of streaming content aren’t full proof. There are many current agreements between major networks like CBS, NBC, FOX, and ESPN which restrict how the broadcast can be viewed, therefore not every broadcast will move at the speed of todays technology. Also if you want every game, via NFL Sunday Ticket, you have to sign up for DirecTV.

Internet Broadcast

ivi, Inc – Station Broadcast
I’m not sure if this is legal and I have yet to even test this, but there’s a company called ivi inc, which lets you stream major broadcast channels online for about $5 / month. Maybe they simply have not gained much of the pie to get noticed by the broadcast giants. This is restricted to only US subscribers.

http://www.ivi.tv/

Out of Country Streams
If you are in the UK, the NFL has a broadcast for you online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/ via BBC. You can also find: http://www.nfluk.com/. Obviously this is going to be restricted by region, so if your not in the UK, you will not get to see it here. If you want to hack your way through, you can probably setup a UK Proxy server and route your browser through the proxy to get setup.

TVU Player Streams
There is another application that takes broadcast streams that are already available to the public, and route them through a video player. You can find the TVU Player. You’ll find this application interesting as you can find public streams of SyFy, CNBC, and various other channels from other countries.

http://tvunetworks.com/

Underground – Illegal
All of these restrictions and contracts getting in the way of viewers and their teams began to drum up the world of the internet underground. These days, illegal content is swapped in the form of Peer to Peer (P2P) data transmitting, where a network of computers are used as the host, rather than being dependent on a single server. Volunteers will route their TV stream through their PC and start leaking it out to the web. They are typically on forum systems and have a variety of hosts. They often go down due to resources or lack of proper setup and have bad quality, latency, and connection. I do not encourage or promote this action, but I believe if you do a search in Google for P2P Sports, there will be a website to get your stream.

For me, I’ll be watching on FOX HD with surround sound. I hope you enjoy the Big Game, how ever you figure out how to watch it.