Very often, I’ve wondered why TV isn’t carried over IP yet. For something broadcast over the public airwaves, it seems strange that no one makes it available over the Internet. I don’t mean being able to play little snippets and stories. I mean that I’d like to be able to do the same thing I can do with some radio stations: stream exactly what they’re broadcasting.

I don’t have a TV in my room. And frankly, I’d buy a 30″ LCD computer monitor before I spent the same amount on a 30″ LCD TV. But I do have several computer monitors. (In theory, my laptop and two 17″ LCDs, plus two 19″ CRTs, though none of them are hooked up right now.)

I think someone sufficiently enterprising could set something up, though. Think of a MythBox, which has a TV capture card. (Yes, they support HDTV.) It’s oriented towards recording, but really, there’s no reason you couldn’t simultaneously stream it over the LAN. It would require a decent amount of horsepower, but quad-core processors are getting cheap. One of those could easily serve a household. You’d just need enough TV cards to allocate one per simultaneous channel being watched (or recorded).

And then you just build a little webserver into the thing, and let me pull up streaming video from any channel I get over cable.

Heck, it’d make a nice appliance…

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