Why can satellite television service easily play high quality movies/shows, while satellite internet service buffers videos constantly even in low quality?
In: Technology
Used to work for DirecTV as a center rep and also a Network Engineer now. When I worked for DirecTV we were just about to deploy HD streams just before the end of SD. When DirecTV sent the TV shows, before they were sent to your TV, it was compressed to filter out any unnecessary repeating data in the stream the most obvious is background, when a TV show comes in and the background is all back with a person talking. There is no need to resend the same background image pixel every time. DirecTV would compress it so only the fore-image was sent so this would save signal bandwidth. So the signal is highly compressed to accommodate all of the channels because you an only have so many streams before the Satellite could send more. Its why when your signal strength is low it starts to pixelate because not all of the data is making it to the dish. Its also why they had to send 2 more satellites to accommodate the HD quality for channels.
Like other people here have mentioned, internet latency is a big one but also there is only so much data compression that can be done at a data level that streaming can accommodate. TV stations can filter the hell out of pre-produced content and live TV shows but a live and active bi-directional data connection is to far and too constant and changing to compress and your computer is going to try and use as much bandwidth the connection will allow for. On top of that you have other users who are connected to the same satellite.
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