For example in the UK ITV Player & 4OD are two popular channels streaming platforms. They both seem to have significant problems streaming consistently smooth TV content… But the adverts that play before & during are seemless HD.
In: Technology
If you’re watching live broadcasts, they cannot be preloaded, so they’re dependent on a continuous reliable connection. Ads on the other hand can be preloaded and thus don’t depend on a reliable connection.
Despite what the global concept and seemingly incredible speeds of the Internet may lead you to believe, physical distance to the data you’re trying to reach matters a lot.
The company you stream from probably has physical computers spread around their service area, either owned or rented, living in big datacenters. When you connect to the stremaing network, your computer’s call is directed to the one you have the best connection to, which is most usually the closest one to you physically.
These servers probably don’t have all the same data on them at any given time. You can stream anything from the network that they offer, but if the datacenter you’re linked to doesn’t have that content, it has to phone up another datacenter that does have it. This can happen more often than you think. You’re a random person with unique preferences who could ask for who knows what at any time. It’s up in the air whether your datacenter has a copy of the thing you’re trying to ask for immediately on hand.
Ads, on the other hand, are served to basically everyone. And they tend to be tailored to specific areas, which lines up relatively well to how the datacenters are distributed. So when a datacenter needs to show you an ad, chances are it already has it fired up loaded ready to go, because it’s serving the same ad to almost every other viewer.
The ad you get might even be hosted at a completely different datacenter. These ad-hosting servers tend to be far more numerous than streaming datacenters, so there’s a good chance that the datacenter with your ad is significantly closer to you than the datacenter your “main” content is coming from. Thus, its streaming quality will be significantly better.
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