[Nullabillity]

They aren't competing against traditional cable providers, they're competing against TPB, and they're behind by a huge margin.

* Works with any player or device, vs you have to use their application

* Free vs $35/mo

* Has been available for 13+ years, vs available nowhere so far

* Available worldwide, vs some unknown region-locking but certainly US-only for the foreseeable future

* Has pretty much everything, vs "6 accounts" whatever that means

[nemothekid]

Live TV isn't competing against TBP. You can't watch sports or other live events on TBP. Why would you sign up for a live TV service, if you prefer to watch things on demand on TPB?

For any live TV offering they are competing against traditional cable providers. Netflix is already on their way on figuring out the "on-demand" content space. If you look at the blog post, 3/4s of the channels offered are either sports or live news. This simply isn't a service for on demand content.

[martinald]

You'd actually be surprised how good bittorrent live video streaming has got. I checked it out and it was pixel perfect 720p HD - absolutely fine for sports.

But yes, it's still niche, but wow it has moved on a lot. The program I used was called acestream.

[kaishiro]

This is still only true if you have the pipe. Attempting this from Melbourne and the streams still fall on their face.

[martinald]

It worked fine on 10meg/1meg ADSL2+. I think most people have access to that (at least in the UK, >95% of population).

[kaishiro]

Haha, 10meg down. I'm lucky to get 5.5...

[Aissen]

You only need a few people locally for the stream to become viable. That's the beauty of p2p.

[sergers]

Live TV competing with illegal IPTV service with reseller cost as low as 2$/month and consumer price 9-20$/month(on a small scale).

I know many people who have either cut their TV subscription, or at least scaled it down to lowest cheaper tier, since grabbing a mag254 IPTV box and finding a reseller offering upwards of 1000s of channels.

If u don't know about it, you may be content with standard livetv. But if you in the know, you are cutting at least part of your cable TV bill.