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.
The answer goes deep into networking technology. I try to explain a few major points:
Streaming is built on IP networking, which in turn can be built on different cable technologies. IP transmits every piece of data reliably, but asynchronously - the sender cannot know how long it will take. This is good for things like the www: everybody gets his individual request fulfilled sooner or later.
“Cable” is built directly on one cable technology. It transmits all things synchronously: you know exactly how long the transmission takes, and the amount of data is the same at all times. This is good for one long movie without any disturbances, but it does not give much flexibility when many different users have many different needs.