Looking for a way around expensive Major League Baseball subscription packages? This guide will show how to stream live Major League Basebal games online for free. Follow your favorite team from virtually anywhere in the world.

1. GO to MyP2P (Baseball Section)

2. PICK THE GAME YOU WANT TO WATCH

3. SELECT A PROGRAM TO WATCH IT WITH

• TVU Player
• TVAnts
• SopCast (WINDOWS ONLY)
• StreamTorrent

Reports are surfacing that Spotify, a popular legal streaming service offered in Europe, has traveled across the pond to set up shop in the United States.

The owner of a website called cinema-world.biz is now facing multiple years in prison for linking to copyrighted material. According to Czech anti-piracy outfit, it's the first time an administrator has been charged, but the owner says that the numbers used as evidence against him are inflated.

Liberec, January 4, 2011: A sixteen year old boy from Liberec was yesterday accused of committing the crime of copyright infringement, rights related to copyright and database rights in accordance with § 152 of the Penal Code. According to police, the crime committed by that ran the website, which after almost two years to allow the public online via links movies and serials. Given his young age he is at only half the prison sentence than an adult, so if found guilty of unlawful interference with copyright to a large extent up to 2.5 years, and monetary measures up to 500,000 crowns. Even if the crime committed until April 2010, police accused him under the Criminal Code in force until the end of 2009, it is favorable to the offender. Under the new Criminal Code, an offense is a breach of copyright, rights related to copyright and database rights can store up to eight-year prison sentence.

I did not load anything anywhere, everything was copied from similar sites.

Well, it was about two months after starting full operation the second site, it was a text ad. The reason was simple: The site has been increasingly difficult for hosting and I could not afford such a pay hosting alone. I went mainly to finance the operation itself, from the beginning I was not profitable.

Absolutely not. Visitors to the site indicated was obviously biased to increase the prestige of the site. There are sites with the same content and a lot more visitors. The daily average was about 7,000 people a few times that I managed to get 15 000 people per day was an exception and not the rule, visitors are also quite varied, last month it was only a few thousand people per day.

Intellectual Property Czar Victoria Espinel recommends that "Congress clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances," and that law enforcement be given wiretap powers for intellectual property crimes.

TVShack remains to be one of the most sought after website for streaming TV that is seemingly not making a return. The website continues to generate interest to this day and some even have started up clone sites to replace the site. Regardless, it doesn't look like the site survived to see the light of 2011, so we have compiled a list of alternatives to the famous streaming site.

Hi ! i was googleing around to shed some light on the recent closing of TV SHACK"CC . i read a previous article on the transition of domains from .net to .cc that you had written. i would be interested if you could shed some light on the matter, like you previously did. thank you

Dear drew! im a big fan of tvshack and wish you a speedy recovery! please if you could keep me posted on any new domains it would be greatly appreciated!

hey there drew...i am very glad that you kept all of the fans and users of tvshack updated by informing the transformation of tvshack.net to tvshack.cc but...now again it is taken over by the government people.can you please help the users once again....?? thanking you,

1. BlinkX

blinkx is the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine. Founded in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake, the company completed a tremendously successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) in May, 2007 rising in the first week of trading to a market capitalization of US$350M, with headquarters in San Francisco, CA and the UK. blinkx has built a reputation as the Remote Control for the Video Web. Now, with an index of over 35 million hours of searchable video and more than 720 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it has cemented its position as the premier destination for online TV.

2. StreamTVGuide

3. LookForTV

4. Cucirca.com

5. TVDuck

TVduck.com is a site where you can simply browse and watch all of your favourite T.V. shows, movies, video clips online.

In a move seemingly inspired by the US government pressuring credit card companies and online payment services to cut off Wikileaks, the MPAA and RIAA are reportedly trying to get Mastercard, and presumably other credit card companies, to cut off sites like MegaUpload and other file-sharing and streaming sites. Some observers suggest that this is part of a new strategy for the conglomerate organizations.

Finds that over half of respondents (54%) said that streaming has led them to quit illegally downloading music, a figure in line with several UK studies from last year that also saw a decline in P2P thanks to streaming.

In news that might give a second reason to call the raids on several streaming sites a failure, TVShack is currently back up under a different domain. It was TVShack.net, now it's TVShack.cc.

A Boxee device will benefit from the relatively high name recognition Avner Ronen and his team have achieved with excellent consumer outreach and a truly engaging product that combines a slick interface with remarkably broad format support.  Perhaps most crucially is Boxee’s very winning social aspect that allows its users to share recommendations and even some video content with their circle of friends.  Of course, execution in the software world does not guarantee success in the very different world of hardware, and much of the gadget’s potential will depend on its actual specifications and price point, naturally, but having worked with Avner and his team a bit myself, I am confident that they will produce something that reflects their intense commitment to a  great user experience.  My guess, without any real inside information, is that the first Boxee box will likely be more of a “proof of concept” device, to get the idea of embedded Boxee out in the world and to provide other manufacturers with a basis to work from for their own product.  The truth is that some of the more engaging aspects of the Boxee application on PCs will be difficult to pull off on an inexpensive and lower-powered CE device.  My personal preference for this kind of functionality is however to use a small, low power and quiet HTPC.  Boxee makes for a great HTPC front end, and with the overall trend towards smaller more efficient PCs like the Atom-powered net-tops, it’s hard for me to envision a standalone Boxee device being better in the end.

For some time now, YouTube has had a feature on many videos that let you see videos “in HD”. Of course, this insinuates that the video will feature the highest quality sound you can hope for. The reality is that the quality of the video does depend on the original quality format the uploader has. If the uploader has a low quality video, YouTube isn’t necessarily going to magically turn it into “HD”.

While discussing an EU commissioner wanting to overhaul regulations related to downloading, we noted a British study that suggested that file-sharing is actually going down in popularity. The source that is gaining on the back of file-sharing’s decrease in popularity? Online streaming. Many are, in fact, getting their music from sites like MySpace and YouTube. Long before the release of the study that pointed to an increase in popularity of streaming, we wrote a guide on how to rip music from MySpace. There’s plenty of ways to get music from YouTube as a simple Google search reveals countless online YouTube stream rippers.

This phenomenon of users getting their music from streamed sources has caught the attention of a number of artists. Recently, this included an artist by the name “Deadmau5″ (pronounced ‘Dead mouse’). For the uninitiated, Deadmau5 is a famous House music producer from Canada. If you’re even somewhat into House music (or many forms of electronica for that matter), there’s a very good chance you’ve heard of this artist. In terms of popularity in a given genre, you could consider him the Linkin Park of House music only with significantly less lyrics.

“Quite frankly,” Deadmau5 wrote, “I kinda feel a bit bummed out that i would create something exclusive for my audiences to be “ripped” from some streaming media [site] as is… moreso when the poster of the media would advertise or title it as “HD” or “High Quality” before it’s release date.”

A little bit of background. Many artists such as Deadmau5, during a live show, beatmatches music together so there’s essentially a constant amount of music being played even though several different songs are played during a live show. Often, larger artists play their music long before their release dates to help promote the new song and increase popularity. Of course, similar styles of performing live transcends to radio as well. This is why some electronica music you hear seems to cut in and out at the end or get cut off completely. It’s called a set rip. There’s still that beatmatching and, consequently, that songs beginning (mostly drum kicks) and ending (also mostly drum kicks) are more or less cut off.

“In fact, Nothing makes me vomit in my mouth more than listening to anything short of a 16bit 44.1kHz Wav / Aiff file… perhaps it’s just the audiophile in me… but i am actually witnessing and realizing for the first time in my life something that i have created that has been reduced to some regurgetated re-re-re-re-recording of a set and dubbed “high quality”… quite frankly im a little embarassed.” Deadmau5 continues.

A WAV file is essentially an uncompressed sound file. When someone encodes it to MP3, the “highs” and “lows” start being lost in an effort to make the file smaller. A good way to demonstrate to yourself what the sound differences are between a high quality and a low quality version of an MP3 is, listened to a song that’s at 320KBps, then compare that to the same song that’s in an MP3 format of 128KBPs. If the differences are seemingly minimal, pay attention to the high hats or cymbals. You may notice that the hats get a little scratchy or distorted as quality is reduced. If you’re listening on, say, a subwoofer system, listen to how heavy the bass is as well.

Admittedly, when it comes to the really high quality stuff, I don’t personally notice the differences. The differences between a 32bit WAV file and a 16bit WAV file is completely inaudible to me. Unfortunately, I don’t own a $50,000 sound system to put my ears to the ultimate test. But if you are wondering, a 16bit WAV file is the quality of a standard CD without any compression (not even to save space as FLAC does without losing any quality). Of course, the difference between 16bit and 32bit isn’t even close to what Deadmau5 is getting at.

“So,” Deadmau5 explains, “situation happens… some guy records the set @ 16 bit 44.1kHz (usually the case) you’ve got my 24 bit version coming out of my DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) then in to someone elses ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) which is only as good as the quality of the ADC.. so already the quality of the music has been compromised, and you havent even gotten it yet.”

“Then, whoever records a direct line from the set then encodes that to 320kpbs MAX or 128 kbps mp3 for media streaming ease. this part is a MAAASSSIIIVEEE degradation of the original signal… and has been mulched to all bloody hell. So…. then what typically happens is yet ANOTHER DAC / ADC conversion…. wheres someone rips the audio from said streaming media outlet only to puke it back onto youtube… which is 128Kbps max in “HD” mode (which is a VERY far cry from HD if you ask me… total abuse of terminology there) shoulda [just] called it ABBDBNR….”A Bit Better Definition But Not Really”. fun times! so… to break it down… lets take a quick look again…”

“Production / Final Master
↓
degraded to 24 bits for live use
↓
degraded to 16 bits for commerical release / distribution
↓
degraded to 16 bits (less accurately) when recorded off a live feed from mixer via DAC / ADC
↓
degraded to 128kbps / 320kbps when published for streaming media outlets
↓
degraded to 128kbps / 320kbps when ripped from streaming media outlet
↓
degraded to 64kbps / 128kbps
=
a very crappy 6th generation copy that magically gets called “HIGH QUALITY VERSION!!!111ONE!!” on youtube…. you figure it out.”

Transcoding has been a problem in the file-sharing community for years, long before the streaming revolution. The situation then was typically someone finding a 128kbps MP3, then re-encoding it into a 320kbps mp3, either thinking that they have a higher quality version of the song or trying to dupe others into believing it’s higher quality. That was typically going along the lines of, “producer quality, degraded to 16bit-like quality for CD, ripped and encoded into a low quality MP3, uncompressed and encoded again to 320kbps”. That’s a 4th generation version, not even a 6th generation version as described by Deadmau5.

Additionally, thanks to standards in streaming and YouTube, the quality is forced to be of a certain level of (lower) quality, so the amount of quality lost is even greater because you lose more quality in each step and that quality doesn’t come back once it’s lost once.

Deadmau5 concludes, “I just think it’s time for us listeners to listen smarter, to educate eachother a little more, give the audiable world out there a bit of a quality control attitude, LISTEN UP folks… our hearing is really a fucking complicated and beautiful thing!!! Why not use it well? It’s like owning the most amazing sportscar and not a drop of gasoline on the planet…. Sometimes when i stick my ears out there, im really starting to fear that even the terminologic use of the words “high quality” is slowing substandardizing itself into an inaudiable heap of nonsense. If my message reaches at least one person, and benefits them in any way, i will die a happy mouse.”

There’s many ways to look at this from an artist standpoint. A positive way to spin the stream ripping activities is to say that if you buy the music, the quality is much greater. Consider it an extra incentive for music fans to legally pay for music for example. We’re not necessarily talking about users who are higher up on the file-sharing food chain here most of the time. Chances are, the users who are listening to ripped streaming music aren’t members of 6 different private sites as the quality difference is monumental between streamed music and, say, FLAC – though people higher up in the file-sharing food-chain are much more encouraged to buy what they like anyway.

Another way one can look at this is the tried, tested and true ‘free advertising’ culture. More people are listening to your music – even if it’s low quality. That means the number of potential customers goes up – or a larger fan base more likely to go to the shows where there’s high quality music being played anyway – countless people see that touring is a huge income earner for artists to begin with.

So has the transcoding problem worsened thanks to streaming? No doubt. The bigger question is, is it at the detriment of artists and listeners?

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.