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.

  • DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I’m honoured that you took the time to type all this out but it looks like I’ve failed yet again at conveying what I meant to ask and I’ll try to rephrase:

    What you have been explaining is broadcasting when all devices are connected to the same network. I want to understand if it is possible to use WiFi just like a radio to broadcast data, without actually connecting. A device can transmit/broadcast, say, a video over the EM waves using some kind of modulation like they do in FM. The receiving devices, like our phones, already have hardware to receive these waves and process it to extract the information. Like I said, it already happens where the SSID of the WiFi transmitter/router is seen by all devices without actually connecting.

    And before you say anything, yes I’m aware that it is a very small amount of data being ‘transmitted’ at a very low bitrate. But what is the limiting factor? Why can’t much more data be transmitted this way?

    I’m really sorry if there is a silly answer to this as I’m sure there must be. But, like I said, i could never find it in my searches.

    Thanks and cheers!