Future of Broadcasting

I have seen the future of broadcasting, and Astro should be very, very afraid.

About a month ago, I was back in my wife's home in Kluang, which had no broadband and no ESPN/Star Sports. Arsenal was going to play MU that night, so I came up with a plan.

I've heard of online sports broadcasts on the Net. So, step 1, I subscribed to Celcom's Daily Broadband (8 bucks). Next, I hooked up my PDA to my notebook. I started surfing the net for online broadcasts.

I ended up downloading something called SOPCast.

I ran it.

A list of channels came out.

My hands shaking with excitement, I clicked on the Star Sports channel.

After a 30 second wait........I was watching the match. Live. On my notebook, hooked to a PDA accessing a 3.5G network to link to the Internet.

As Arsenal began to lose badly, the number of peers started dropping, and the stream began to get jerky.



SOPCast is actually a peer-to-peer internet tv system, and works very much like BitTorrent. Which means the quality of the stream very much depends on how many peers are there sharing the same channel.

As broadband becomes more commonplace all over the world and the pipes get bigger, in the future, will we still be watching tv as we know it?