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As with many aspects of the web the concept of streaming and watching TV content around the world is a lot easier in theory that in reality:

• A lot of content is illegal
• Picture quality of streamed video can be a problem
• Some broadcasters allow users to pay to download content, but downloading can be slow.
• Streamed files typically do not remain saved on your hard drive.

The article on the BBC is a good read as it manages to point out the pluses and the minuses:

“One of the challenges is that the internet really isn’t set up to deliver high resolution video, and so it needs assistance, help and support to enable it to do so,” said Phill Robinson of CacheLogic.

“There are basically two exabytes of traffic that flow over the internet. We have got to that level of traffic growth over the last 20 years. It’s going to rise and quadruple over the years to eight exabytes.

That is a huge amount of traffic. but it does depend on the content providers playing ball:

Traditional broadcasters and movie studios have been comparably slow in putting their content on the internet because of the problems associated with making money.

The answer? “To combine the two in a hybrid network,” Mr Robinson said. “So we have a new generation of P2P technology with a new generation of cache technology that work together to blend the bandwidth from the caches as well as the peers.”

Via [BBC]