I’ve never known cable providers of failures to broadcast live TV in its history. MASH (not live) amongst many others had 70-100+ million viewers, many shows had 80%+ of the entire nation viewing something on its network without issue. I’ve never seen buffering on a Superbowl show.
Why do streaming services suffer compared to cable television when too many people watch at the same time? What’s the technical difficulty of a network that has improved over time but can’t keep up with numbers from decades ago for live television?
I hate ad based cable television but never had issues with it growing up. Why can’t current ‘tech’ meet the same needs we seemed to have solved long ago?
Just curious about what changed in data transmission that made it more difficult for the majority of people to watch the same thing at the same time.
Cable infrastructure is built different, with multicast streams. All the channels are broadcast on their network at all times to relays all the way up to your neighbourhood, if not your cable box. It’s got dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth. It can’t get overloaded.
With streaming, each user is one connection using one stream worth of bandwidth, so it doesn’t scale too well to millions of viewers. Technically there’s multicast stuff but it only works locally, and I’m sure all those cable companies that are also ISPs aren’t all that interested in making it work either. So for now we have thousands of identical streams crossing the country at the same time hogging bandwidth and competing with everything else using bandwidth.