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.
Short version: cable is more optimized for sending everyone the same content at the same time. (And all users connected to cable get all channels all the time, even if they’re only watching one or two at the time.) Internet is made for each user getting what they ask for when they ask for it.
Either technology can be used for either use case, but they were originally built for different purposes and so are optimized differently.
Just like a subway train would make a pretty crappy private one-person vehicle for commuting to work and the grocery store. As would a fleet of cars be crappy for public mass transit.