The Latest in Free Video

As the 20th century world continues to try and limit the expansion of streaming, this just in -- want to beat the system for your home team's video stream? Hook up a deal with someone off shore, rig up the slingbox to a Dazzle unit, push stream through a proxy to the off-shore and then tell all your buddies about the free video.

Or, by shorter name, justin.tv.

Are we really surprised? Free television beget pay cable; over time pay cable became standard thanks to advertising and cable systems wanting to hold off satellite. Now various pirates around the world are making those ever-so-portable digital assets, well, portable.

The networks have finally figured it out. The streaming is free (to the end user; of course it's advertising supported) for Hulu and many of the major sports teams.

This is just the more advanced, less cease-and-desistable, version of using the home state billing and zip code to fool systems (or proxy servers to beat IP checking).

The college sports world will fight to keep its blackouts and protections. And the ones that will get hurt are the ones with U.S. addresses. Kind of like the reward Real got for trying to play by the rules with the movie industry over copying DVDs to hard drives. They're injuncted, but all those off-shore DVD rippers that will never pay royalty dollar one continue to roll.