Eli5: How do we send videos through the air?
In: 0
Via radio waves.
We can send messages by slightly altering the waves.
It used to be that this was mostly done with analogue signals, but nowadays it is almost all digital.
To oversimplify: TVs used to work by sending ray from side to side top to bottom many times per second and the radio signal would vary and tell the TV how strong/bright the ray needed to be at each part of its path across the screen. including things like sound, color and subtitles and videotext made things more complicated, but that was the basics.
Nowadays everything is digital and we just send out a string of 1s and 0s with the change of radio waves. Those 1s and 0s are used to describe what color each pixel on the screen has.
There are a bunch of really complicated compression methods involved to reduce the number of 1s and 0s you need to send to describe the moving pictures but that is it.
Latest Answers