Livestation.me - all the major media stations streamed live on the Internet

For those of you who don't have cable television, one of the downsides of getting your media from the Internet is that you often don't have access to 'live' content.

It's not really a big deal mind you, given all the content is posted online by the major media outlets usually an hour or so after it aired live.

When big things happen, like a terror attack or a presidential debate, the major networks typically open up live streaming to the public, so in those instances you can get live content. But otherwise, you have to wait an hour or so after a program to see the content. And for folks in Canada, sites like Hulu or CNN don't work (with CNN you have to have a cable account with an American provider to access their live internet feed, with Hulu it won't work if you have a Canadian ISP).

Well, leave it to the ingenuity of the Web to get around all this.

I stumbled on this site - www.livestation.me - which is a collection of live streaming of media outlets around the world. It works pretty good.

It's not just for news, it's the actual station. So for instance, the NBC feed streams whatever is showing on NBC if you had access to the cable feed itself (so as I'm writing this, it's the Biggest Loser that's on). I took a quick vid with my camera to show you...

I'm not sure how Livestation is able to do this, as I can't image it is endorsed by the various networks. I suspect the feeds are coming from someone who is transmitting their cable television feed out to the internet as a live station streaming feed.

I guess the best way to describe it would be 'real time pirating' but at the same time if that were truly the case one would assume they would be shut down.

Either way though, it's a great resource for PR folks who want to see what's playing in real-time on the various media outlets around the world. Obviously it could also be used by normal folks who want to ditch their cable tv and still have access to most of the channels.

Although it should be noted, the streams are not always active (but for the most part, most of them are usually up).

Hence why I see it more as a great resource for PR folks who want to have the news running in the background occasionally while they work or who aren't near a television but still want to follow what the media are covering in real time.

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