You've seen the adverts, you've seen the articles, the links, the Xombytes and Xomblurbs and spams. "Watch Manchester United v Chelsea Free Live Streamed Now." Sounds too good to be true, so in an idle moment I thought I'd check out how it worked.

Before I do so it is worth stepping out of the net and getting a dose of reality. The English Premier League make hundreds of millions of pounds (probably even billions) licensing their live games to TV stations around the world. For example, I can watch more live EPL games here in Thailand than I can in the UK. But they are all broadcast by paid for satellite channels, save for one game a weekend shown by the terrestrial service. The EPL is not going to distribute live games via the internet for free. So where do these free live streamed games come from?

The good news is that there are a lot of free TV channels available through the internet. The world is a big place, with nearly 200 countries and even more languages. So it is entirely possible for you to watch episodes of your favourite soap for free... dubbed in Uzbek or Malay! It is also possible to watch hundreds of news and entertainment channels with free legitimate internet feeds. For the moment, I will just give one link to WorldTVPC to show you a site that works.

However, live sports is big business and, as I said, the EPL is not going to give their games away for free. Those adverts screaming 'free live feeds' come in two flavours. Firstly, with so many channels it is possible with some searching and some luck to find your game being shown on a foreign channel. You will be able to watch the game but will have to put up with commentary in a foreign language. Some of those live sports feed adverts have done the searching for you and all you have to do is pick which language you can tolerate.

However, I have found that a second option appears. There are already a number of aggregated TV feed websites, such as Justin.tv. This is a kind of P2P shared TV streams service, rather like a cross between YouTube and LimeWire but dedicated to TV channels rather than isolated video clips. It is now possible for an individual to have their own internet TV channel and broadcast to the globe. The content being broadcast could be anything... including live sports!

This is how most live EPL games broadcast in English find their way onto the internet. An individual who has paid for a sports channel will run the cable or satellite feed through their computer and re-broadcast it via one of the TV feed websites. The legality of this should be obvious to everyone. However, a free live game is a free live game so let's suspend judgement and watch the spectacle!

However, websites like Justin.tv don't really want to be taken to court over transmitting copyrighted material on their system. It does however, take time for a website to scan and vet every single feed. In my experience, once they find a live sports feed coming from a single user they cut the feed. So I ended up watching only the first half of Man Utd v Chelsea! The feed never came back and I was reduced to reading the live commentary on Yahoo!

You might be lucky and get to watch a whole game, but be prepared for play to be suspended.

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