Despite the best efforts of various TV and music organisations, I’m more convinced than ever that content simply has to be made available for free, and monetised in a method other than subscriptions or Pay Per View.

Almost every day, there’s a new push by various industry groups to penalise file sharers, which is about as effective as trying to stop ants coming into your garden. But regardless, the focus on P2P file sharing seems to have ignored another delivery method which is just as damaging to the idea of paid content – if not moreso.

Yesterday I stumbled across the Chelsa – Tottenham London derby – a football (soccer for my U.S. readers) match that would either cost money to view, or require a trip to a pub. Instead I watched it in my house, for free, and in reasonable quality. I won’t say which site I watched, as obviously i don’t want to encourage illegal behaviour – but it didn’t require any downloads, any file sharing, or any effort on my part.

It was via a webcam sharing service, and quick research shows it’s definitely not the only one which is being used to distribute media content as much as lifestreaming webcams of individuals. What was really interesting was that a quick scan round showed the lifestreaming webcam shows were picking up as many as 100 viewers – whereas the live streaming of sporting events like the football was picking up over 10,000 viewers!

There have been ways for the determined to avoid paying for football etc for quite a few years, but all of them tended to require a software download, and a bit of guesswork (sometimes involving navigating Asian menus to find streams from the Far East for example – so I’ve been told!). But ttis method means no barriers, no hassles, and a quicker response than even official media players like the BBC iPlayer.

And if 10,000 watched the game with me, it’s not outside the realms of the imagination to picture at least another 50 or 100 sites offering the same content, with figures also in the thousands. The site I viewed certainly wasn’t the biggest or most well known in the genre – so are we saying 500,000 or 1,000,000 people were watching the game for free yesterday?

That number only grows with word-of-mouth, and removing one site or broadcaster will only see it replaced by more. In fact, with faster broadband, better webcams, and better ways of feeding live streams, it’d be even easier for a group of 5 or 10 people to club together and set up their own private network to share the costs of just one of them signing up for paid content.

And trying to shut down every example is akin to trying to cut the grass with a pair of nail scissors….

I’ve talked about how TV companies can still monetise themselves, and at the moment, there’s a little opportunity for content that exists at the edges of popularity, because it’s hard to find a stream. But all it takes is one person with a webcam to solve that problem…