tcputils from Debian does precisely that, allowing you to extend a UNIX pipe over a TCP connection. It's not generally available as a package in other distros,

tcputils from Debian does precisely that, allowing you to extend a UNIX pipe over a TCP connection. It's not generally available as a package in other distros, but you can easily grab the source from Debian and compile it yourself. Consequently, tarballing to stdout and piping over tcputils is by far the fastest and most efficient way to send a large number of files over a network.