IPTV

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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