NFL season starts in a couple weeks. How do yall stream NFL games? I’ve usually used buffstream in the past but I’m wondering if there’s a better site/method.
I wish there was a good option. It’s actually legal to re-broadcast an over the air signal, provided it’s not altered in any way (re-encoded).
There should be a live torrent system for OTA TV. Antenna owners could use it to ensure perfect signal. The stream could be divided up by key frames and hashed (as bit torrent is). Any antenna owner would compare their hash to others to check if it was properly received. If not, that chunk could be downloaded instead of using the signal.
Such a system would make it easy to extend to leechers. They could offer a service to the antenna owners: hard disk space. The leechers are the ones who allow DVR service to the antenna owners.
Everybody wins. Antenna owners get perfect signal and they can pause and fast forward through commercials. Leechers get to view the live program without an antenna, and store the stream to repair antenna-owner broadcasts.
I looked into it a bit further and it seems the ATSC stream packets already contain built-in checksums! The interesting bit is that all the sub-channels are actually inter-mixed in one stream. So if you’re tuned to 13-1, your TV is reading and ignoring 13-2, 13-3 etc.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any stream-correcting p2p network. I think it would start with a relatively open source tuner card. I think the tuner software is typically closed source, but it would be doing the work of reading the radio stream of a frequency and sending out an mpeg stream.
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