That's not true in some ways, TV requires a huge number of transmitters and is limited to a few channels, where the internet has a virtually infinite number of channels.
Even now it's digital here in the UK I believe each of the 5(?) muxes can only support tens of channel each.
Airwaves TV might scale easily but can only send a proportionally small amount of information, but the internet send a vastly larger amount of data per second, but struggles when everyone wants the same data at once.
Digital over-the-air TV works similarly to analog over-the-air, but it's slower to change channels because the TV has to wait for a frame that isn't a delta from a previous frame to display a coherent image. That's just sort of par for the course with modern digital compression, you could increase the number of such frames but then the compression gets less effective and you'd still have more of a delay than with analog.
So quantity over quality. The UK used to have 4-5 analogue TV stations (the fifth wasn't available everywhere), now it has digital with something like 100+ channels all constantly broadcasting low quality, repetitive rubbish. We got rid of the analogue stations to make way for "+1" channels where they broadcast the same thing 1 hour later. It's a complete waste of the spectrum.
In the UK, all channels are typically transmitted from all transmitters (with some regional programming on some channels) and except for some locations where there's too much spectrum overlap and some channels are missing. Right now, they're in transition to digital (DVB-T) so that's probably not quite true anymore, as some transmitters don't have analog channels anymore. Transmitters are usually also too far apart to be able to receive a good enough signal from more than one.
Broadcasting uses a highly limited resource, local TV freqiencies. Especially until recently, these were really limited to a dozen or so channels per metro area.
There are far more than a dozen websites out there.
Oh I didn't know that over the air TV broadcasts use MPEG. I'm surprised that digital over the air even decodes at all considering how poor I remember the quality being in my childhood. I was referring more to cable.
It's like if everybody has a TV and a mini TV studio in their home. The number of channels are nearly illimited. Main difference is that huge part of the content is text.
Though in the end there is absolutely no difference.
In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't even have a TV).
I can relate to your point in general. The Internet is indeed quirky and glitchy, while TV generally works even for the elderly. However...
> My TV always works - it never buffers, shows glitchy video, or requires a page refresh (or god forbid a reboot).
... I guess you haven't had an IPTV setup, yet. :) I did (I have FTA DVB-T now) and buffering + glitchy video is a reality more frequently than I'd expect. Reboots are also necessary and were really deal breakers, as I didn't have RF overlay.
One could argue, though, that IPTV is more Internet than TV, or at least has the bad part of the Internet leaking to the TV realm and adding quirkiness. It's true. However, as mentioned above, now I have DVB-T and, god, buffering and glitchy video are even worst (but that's politics and clientelism, which is different matter for another discussion).
My point being: considering that TV "just works", nowadays, isn't really so clear-cut. Digital transmission and encoding, all these apps and added value with the extra capabilities of set-top boxes, yadda yadda, actually made it worse! Talk about having technology pushed down our throats (and to no advantage!). We just got a worst experience - it's a great example of how much telcos (IT in general, I'd say) aren't customer-centric.
I remember an anecdote from an old school broadcast engineer I knew about 15 years ago. He recalled some sales guy from Real coming in and saying "with this new box we can broadcast to 5 thousand people". Engineer pointed to a picture of crystal palace transmitter that happened to be in the room -- "with that we can transmit to 5 million".
I'm not convinced how muliticast works to mobile devices, but it's a painfully edge case. This type of event occurs in the UK once every 4 years (the olympics doesn't pull in these numbers -- except for 2012 when it was hosted in London), and even then only when England do well (so once every 20 years)
That said, ITV latency seemed far shorter than BBC latency, watching ITV player seemed acceptable. Apart from the lackluster commentary and the adverts.
Broadcast TV doesn't place any more restrictions or limitations on linearity of watching than any other transmission medium. If anything, broadcast TV places fewer restrictions since it's open access - anyone can connect and receive.
It's the devices used to receive the information, as well as the viewer's desire to be WATCH IT NOW which force the linearity.
Southern hemisphere calling – things look a bit different from here due to the different network and broadband environment, but the basic principles cross borders. I’d just caution about assuming TV=American TV. Sure, the US situation is as interesting as hell but you’re missing a lot of cool stuff happening in other places. Looking at the global impact of a profoundly disruptive technology it helps to take a more global perspective.
I spent most of my youth working in network TV, then moved to talk radio and the last 15 years in internet, most recently running the online video output for a newspaper publisher. I moved to that job explicitly because I wanted to have a hand on the knife that killed broadcast TV. Always wanted to live in the future, to do what I could to bring it on, and I saw the power of the networks as retarding at best and toxic at worst. Couple of years down the track, I realize things ain’t that simple. I no longer see a simple dualism, TV vs the Internet. Audiences are not fleeing one monolithic platform for another, they are fragmenting. This is how Nielsen can find that TV consumption is at record highs (151hrs/wk in US, according to a Feb 09 survey) while internet usage is also rising. God only knows what crap is in that 151 hours, but the same can be said of internet video.
There’s a new ecology of media emerging, as a profusion of digitally networked screens fill our living rooms, pockets, desks, cars and hands. To my eternal joy it doesn’t look like it will settle to an ossified steady state any time soon, unlike TV and Radio which have been using the same model for 70 and 50 years respectively.
Now I think the internet will no more kill TV than TV killed radio or radio killed cinema. Despite DVDs and huge plasmas, cinema is doing just fine. There’ll be less money for the successors of broadcast networks, fewer ad dollars split more ways: so inevitably less money not just for the corporates but also for the production crews and creatives. Cheaper TV. We will have an ecology: a whole lot of fizzing and spitting new beasties have crawled out of the media swamp and the big old beasties (a) don’t like the look of it at all, they don’t play by the rules, and (b) don’t realize being eaten alive by ants is still being eaten alive. Many of the networks will collapse; certainly the corporate structures are unsustainable, but people will still want communal big-screen narrative experiences, and will want them well made. That costs money and takes, for better or worse, concentrations of expertise, machines and skills that cost money.
We make short feature material, quite profitably, subverting a;ll the TV [production models we can, but have discovered where the bottom limit for professional ad-supported shortform online video is.. and it’s higher than you think. Any fool can make a video and whack it up on YouTube as a hobby, and not make a living. To make hundreds of videos over a span of years, supporting several staff and turn a profit is not so easy. Fortunately the audience fragmentation means we can turn a buck from any number of iterations, including broadcast TV.
Network TV ain’t dead, you can’t kill it with a stick, it’s a zombie which has no brain to speak of yet hungers for yours. It’s going to be with us for a long time yet: but as one of the crowd, not the bully on the block.
In rural places in the US, it's terrible for television. Several years ago, it was mandated that TV stations switch from analogue to digital.
Now instead of getting a little static and being able to understand 100% of what is said and shown over the air; it's now 10% recognizable video 90% visual blocks, and 0% audio.
Even now it's digital here in the UK I believe each of the 5(?) muxes can only support tens of channel each.
Airwaves TV might scale easily but can only send a proportionally small amount of information, but the internet send a vastly larger amount of data per second, but struggles when everyone wants the same data at once.
reply