I’ve never known cable providers of failures to broadcast live TV in its history. MASH (not live) amongst many others had 70-100+ million viewers, many shows had 80%+ of the entire nation viewing something on its network without issue. I’ve never seen buffering on a Superbowl show.
Why do streaming services suffer compared to cable television when too many people watch at the same time? What’s the technical difficulty of a network that has improved over time but can’t keep up with numbers from decades ago for live television?
I hate ad based cable television but never had issues with it growing up. Why can’t current ‘tech’ meet the same needs we seemed to have solved long ago?
Just curious about what changed in data transmission that made it more difficult for the majority of people to watch the same thing at the same time.
Broadcast versus on demand.
Cable sends the sane data to everyone at the same time. So it is something like, read from the hard drive once. Send it out once. Everywhere it goes, it is just the same thing replicated to each and every reciever, no changes, just copy and paste.
Streaming is different. Every piece of information sent is basically unique, you need to send each piece of information perfectly, you need to read from the hard drive thousands of times, as everyone is watching something different, you need to send unique information to the right location perfectly and in order and at the right time. If it goes wrong, you get buffering.
Cable and Broadcast, no buffer ing, but no choice.
Streaming, choice but with buffering