I don’t quite understand the difference in the technology. An example I’m thinking of is that if you’re streaming a TV program online that has a ton of simultaneous viewership (say, the Super Bowl), you’re liable to run into bandwidth issues—buffering, freezes, pixelated video, etcetera, as the servers are taxed with keeping up with the demand of all the viewers.
The same thing doesn’t happen with cable tv, even though it is also a digital signal coming over a wire. No matter how many people are watching, the cable tv provider is able to put out perfect quality video to everyone with no buffer time.
What is the difference in the tech that allows cable tv to do this but not online streaming video?
In: Technology
Cable TV is broadcasting the same thing to everyone, and if you miss it, either you had DVR recording it or you missed it (tho newer cable TV is basically just internet streaming). So it’s more like one stream of data being copied to everyone.
Netflix can be sending “series A episode 5 at 4:00” to one person, “series A episode 5 at 5:00” to a different person, while sending “series B episode 25 at 23:00” to someone else. People can skip forward and backward and immediately switch to a different series or episode. So there are multiple different data streams sent do individuals.
Services like YT have orders of magnitude more videos with much more users at different parts of the video. ISPs are often also Cable TV providers. Cable TV always gets priority to guarantee quality. ISPs sometimes drops internet bandwidth for too many users. Cable TV can drop bandwidth too, but it’s very rare
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