Frankly, when I've gone to read about this, and the byzantine nature of regional cable contracts built around these sports packages, it doesn't sound like it's going to be possible for quite some time. It makes my eyes spin. Everything is built around this decentralized, incoherent mess of contracts that can't be neatly combined in a way that a universal service could be offered. Basically, almost all of Cable's revenue is tied up in these contracts, so the entire industry and these contracts are built around interests hostile to disrupting that status quo.
Guys in here have already mentioned Sling, and that's been the most promising avenue so far.
@Tamriel Terror just mentioned YouTube.tv. I was aware of the service, but that post just enlightened me to the depth of its sports programming. I was ignorant.
Others have alluded to the high seas, but even the high seas aren't what
@BVG is making them out to be. It's free. That's the bonus. The video quality is freaking garbage on most of those streams when they're actually live. None of those pirate kings is paying big money to host servers to make sure it's smooth sailing for all. You can't rely on peer-generated stream quality for live sporting events--
obviously. The peers don't yet possess the actual data of the stream. You're limited to the shared bandwidth from all the peers uploading their own stream in real-time: split between everyone who is trying to access that.
