IVI ..not gotta license....whatye going todo about it?

(said in an italian accent  yeh i know bad joke).

There is a really interesting article in TechCrunch today.

Seattle-based ivi has arrived.  ivi lets you watch live television on the Internet.  ivi has not sought permission from or paid broadcasters.  ivi draws revenue from a flat monthly fee.  For a premium, ivi offers DVR “time sifting” features such as pause, rewind, and fast forward.  ivi currently streams programs from New York and Seattle affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and a few other networks.  So, next Thursday you could watch an episode of The Office as it airs on WNBC (an NBC station in New York)
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/01/after-ten-years-round-two-of-the-legal-battle-over-internet-tv-is-here/


There is a similar company in Australia doing the same thing with FTA, check out http://www.mytvr.com.au/

Will be interesting to see how this one plays out, especially in reference to the cablevision ruling last year - http://blog.collins.net.pr/2008/08/cloudification-of-your-content.html  
 
Personally i can totally see both sides of the fence on this one, but at the end of the day i dont believe that television channels just because they are broadcasting that they "give away" the rights to all and sundry. The bigger question though is what happens if someone invents a device which installs on a home network but then routes the traffic off to disks in the cloud? eg a slingbox that comes with cloud storage capabilities, oh and real time encoding into multiple formats eg. mobile, low bandwidth laptop streaming, PSP or iPad size all in real time......
 
May we live in interesting times.
 
 
Cheers,
Dean