How is the Internet functionally different from television or radio broadcasts?
In: Engineering
Broadcasts are identical to all of the recipients; they are a one-way form of communication. The internet allows you to communicate in return, and receive personalized communications. And it’s more than just a two-way connection, it allows communication with many different sites and people simultaneously.
Most importantly, the internet is two way. With TV and radio, you’ve got big transmitters sending out data/content, and lots of small receivers accepting that data/content, but the receiving end can’t send data back to the transmitter.
With the internet, there’s two way bandwidth, which means that the receiving end can request data. So with the internet, you can tell the transmitter/server what kind of data/content you want. It also allows for the receiving end to let the transmitter know if some of the data gets lost along the way, so it can be resent. Data transmission tends to be inherently kind of noisy, and so a lot of data can get scrambled/lost along the way. The ability to ask for that missed data to be resent is really important for a lot of services/tasks.
Unlike radio and TV, the Internet is a marketer’s dream.
Regular broadcast media just throws a signal out into the universe, and you can’t directly measure who’s receiving the signal, or how long they’re using it.
The Internet allows casters the basic ability to monitor and document who’s consuming it, how long and where they’re geographically located. With more sophisticated tools, things can become even more granular right down to an individual and his/her other behaviors, likes and dislikes. Essentially tracking that person across the internet like a tick on a dog.
TV and radio broadcasts are one way communication only. The TV or Radio station send out a signal and the TV or radio picks up the signal. Importantly, It’s a communication from one source to any number of users, and all the users get the same signal. In other words, every radio within range of the transmitter and tuned to the same station is getting the same signal at the same time.
The internet on the other hand is both 2-way communication, communication between multiple points, *and* user specific. Unlike radio and TV where only one source broadcasts a signal, the internet is *multiple* computers and servers, and they’re talking back and forth to each other constantly exchanging information. Also, unlike TV or radio, with the internet, you only get the data that *you* *specifically* requested. So everyone on the internet at the same time can be doing different things, even on the same website.
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