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

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by betabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] count_dongulus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

At least with UDP we can avoid further doubling the stream transmission bandwidth cost, since it won't expect acks and possible retransmissions. Great explanation!

[-] stoy@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

Using TCP for video streaming would be horrible at best, but probably actually unusable.

This is due to the retransmissions of lost packets, which would not work well, or even just break up the stream.

Same goes for TCP and multiplayer games.

this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024

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