Watching TV on the Internet

Won't be long before the networks catch up with these sorts of things, but until then, thank god for TiVo (and goodbye commercials).

i have a friend who recently moved from england to norway. his main beef is that he misses UK tv. he's not very torrent-savvy so is there some other way of watching uk tv over the internet? i'm sure i heard about some kind of box that plugs into a digital tv box in the uk and lets someone watch it wherever they are in the world, is this a real thing or something i dreamed up?

remote access vpn works - i used to use my vpn client to access uni servers so i could watch the iplayer (ok and also access JSTOR). But obv that depends on having a remote access account w/ a uk-based company or institution.

http://zattoo.com/ is pretty good and will get you most of the British freeview digital channels. I'm not sure if it works from outside the UK but I don't see why now.

Dunno how accurate this is:

The service is currently restricted to Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Norway (closed again in 2008), United Kingdom and France, but was in 2007 expected to expand to other European countries, (with Austria and Poland being at the top of that list[13]) then to Canada and the U.S. while adding fee-based channels to its list.

Is there a more recent thread for live TV streaming services? Couldn't find one. The latest increase in my cable bill has me looking into Sling TV and Playstation Vue. Curious to hear anyone's experience.