Ive noted that Internet TV and streaming are delayed by about 30-45 seconds from what a live cable broadcast used to be. I understand that at this current time this is due to certain limitations in transferring the data. However, will we ever have a product that does not have delay over internet available to the general audience? I understand this probably doesn’t matter to most, however, for a sports fan like myself I do wish there were as little as a delay as possible.
In: Technology
Anything that didn’t have a delay isn’t going to tolerate network outages, or handle bandwidth limits changing, etc. It is possible to stream video with less than 1 second delay, but that means that if your internet is down for 1 second, it’ll stutter and buffer.
That 30-45 seconds is partially because files are being produced that are multiple seconds long but one isn’t ready quite yet, the actual broadcasting delays are part of that of course, and the fact that your video player is buffering extra data. I’ll bet if you unplugged the data from your video player, it’ll keep running for about 15 seconds, maybe longer. (Note: if you want to actually try this, unplug a data cable that doesn’t go directly into your video player to make sure it doesn’t notice right away… there should be at least 1 such cable)
So that’s the tradeoff. The delay is a lot longer, but it tolerates internet connection problems WAY way better. Smooth playback is considered very important because any buffering or playback pauses *will* annoy users.
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