Someone is going to have to deal with the question of live sports coverage, somehow, before this can happen.
I consider it a solved problem. I bet more of the big sports leagues would _love_ to cut out the middle men and monetize viewership more directly somehow (like NBA league pass and MLB.tv are).
The NFL is pretty much the trend setter in the sports world when it comes to media. They were the first to figure out the right way to do a TV deal back in the early 70s, the first to start their own network, etc. It's only a matter of time.
The hope, I suppose, is that future TV deals will decrease to the point that the leagues realize that they can make more money by just distributing it all themselves. That's seems to be what they are setting up at least, but the short term they are making so much money off of TV licensing.
The NBA All-Star game has been shown online for the last few years and it's a better experience because you can choose from four cameras (one of which was following a single player, very cool). That part of the technology is awesome, but I suppose you'd have bandwidth problems at a large enough scale.
What's going to be interesting is when both real-time rendering and motion capture get good enough to serve as a vehicle for live sports. Imagine being able to put the camera anywhere you want, or on anyone you want. That will kill TV sports if nothing else does in the meantime.
Alternatively, ESPN could stream (and should! Could you imagine if they got the ad money directly for the Super Bowl??? I bet ESPN would be licking its chops for that kind of money)
