Ask Lemmy

27042 readers

1346 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Cable vs streaming tech? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/asklemmy

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] TootSweet 12 points 1 week ago

Short version: cable is more optimized for sending everyone the same content at the same time. (And all users connected to cable get all channels all the time, even if they're only watching one or two at the time.) Internet is made for each user getting what they ask for when they ask for it.

Either technology can be used for either use case, but they were originally built for different purposes and so are optimized differently.

Just like a subway train would make a pretty crappy private one-person vehicle for commuting to work and the grocery store. As would a fleet of cars be crappy for public mass transit.