6 ms·

It's really interesting to see the tech being deployed to fix this problem. But it also amazes me how complicated we've managed to make things. In the UK in par

• djhworld 8y ago
  The interesting element of the online streaming is the rise of people watching on their phones/tablets, where getting a traditional OTA signal isn't possible.
  • sova 8y ago
    In Japan many cell phones have antennas to pick up OTA signals
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      Korea, too. Probably some other countries. I remember the PSP had an optional OTA antenna. There have been several attempts at doing the same thing in the U.S., but none of them ever worked out for various reasons. Often it was because of the expense of upgrading the tens of thousands of TV transmitters across the country. This one died in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO In a small country with more centralized control of broadcasting and less territory to cover like Japan and Korea, it's much easier.
    • sushid 8y ago
      Yup, I remember when I thought having my Motorola RAZR was the epitome of cool, people in Seoul would flip up their seemingly dumber phones and stream crystal clear HD TV in the subway.
      • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        For South Korea it's not normal HDTV but a special broadcast for mobile devices, DMB [1]. It was only recently updated to support 720p in favor of 240p. They aren't picking up the domestic ATSC signals. The Japanese mobile video system is a similar separate broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcastin...
  • isostatic 8y ago
    Indeed. And it's not good. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44722812 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44722812 Actors have vented their fury at two audience members who watched England's World Cup penalty shoot-out on their phones in the front row of a musical. Titanic The Musical actor Niall Sheehy said the women "not only followed the penalty shootout on their phone, but also said 'yesss' on each goal scored". He declared: "You are the most ignorant audience members I have ever had the misfortune to perform in front of."
    • jrockway 8y ago
      You're blaming technology for social problems. For every person that interrupts a play, there are 10 people quietly watching on their train home... turning wasted time into time enjoyed. Rude people are always going to be rude, and we shouldn't worry about the technology that enables them to do so. If they couldn't watch soccer during a musical, they'd just be coughing loudly or rummaging around in their pockets looking for a mint or having a too-loud "private" conversation with the person next to them. Phones have changed nothing.
      • comex 8y ago
        I’m not confident it’s actually true that “phones have changed nothing”. They’ve certainly increased the variety of distractions one can access from a theater seat, as well as the ease of accessing them. But it’s also clear that most people have enough self-control to avoid using their phones for the duration of a musical, so it’s reasonable to blame those who don’t rather than blaming the technology. (This is distinct from the longer-term phenomenon of phone addiction, where there’s more room to blame the technology’s addictive qualities…)
        • isostatic 8y ago
          This is the same argument that people use about "don't blame guns, it's people that are the problem" Seems to me that theatres (and cinemas) should be putting passive farady cages to block signals coming in, I'd pay extra for that.
  • throwaway2048 8y ago
    Just a sidenote, there is really nothing preventing that techically speaking, after cellular signals are OTA, and handheld tvs used to be a thing.
• isostatic 8y ago
  Still do. While just over 1 million watched the last BBC england game on iplayer (before it crashed), at least 20 million were watching on BBC One. Everything else makes perfect sense to broadcast, but live -- especially zero-latency live -- over unicast http calls? Ridiculous. A shame the BBC's multicast trials never took off.
  • djhworld 8y ago
    > While just over 1 million watched the last BBC england game on iplayer (before it crashed), at 3.8 million according to https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/08/england-world-cup-win-sweden-watched-by-20m-bbc-tv-viewers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/08/england-world-...
    • isostatic 8y ago
      That's 3.8 total, not concurrently I.e. people tried iplayer, saw how crap the experience was (in this niche case), then found a TV or pub with TV to watch it on.
      • djhworld 8y ago
        Ah concurrents. In this case the stream went down in the last 5 minutes of the match, which is still bad, but not as bad as YouTube TV earlier this week! https://twitter.com/YouTubeTV/status/1017121393857556485 https://twitter.com/YouTubeTV/status/1017121393857556485
      • wayanon 8y ago
        Or found the pub was using iPlayer too..
  • blntechie 8y ago
    In India , we had a 9.7 million concurrent streams record recently for a cricket game with a service called Hotstar. The stream at least for me was ahead of Cable TV, not sure if they delayed the TV broadcast to account for live streaming delay to make it appear live.
• mpg33 8y ago
  Same with radio in cars. It just works.
  • mattacular 8y ago
    I love things that just work but it's a little unfair to compare radio technology that has been around for over 100 years and backed by huge public infrastructure investments with internet-based live streaming that has been around for (being generous) maybe 10-15 years at the most?
    • vokep 8y ago
      Not really when theres a good chance its ending up going through radio technology still anyways (wifi). And its a matter of complexity - its obvious why OTA would have less problems to solve in order to get the same performance and behavior of something more complex.
      • laumars 8y ago
        OTA doesn't have less problems to solve. You have all the same problems of digital encoders etc (since all the media is digital anyway) PLUS the problems of transmission towers, solar events (I kid you not), wildlife, etc. You have the safety and cost problems supporting those hazardous and highly expensive equipment in remote locations. IP streaming does actually solve a lot of problems. Plus these days OTA transmissions are all digital anyway. So serving that digital content via the internet is a natural progression. Sure things are superficially more complex at the moment but the technology hasn't matured yet.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      maybe 10-15 years at the most 21 years ago, we learned to hate the word "Buffering..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks
      • isostatic 8y ago
• philjohn 8y ago
  The problem is we only have a finite amount of spectrum available, and people like choice, so there are more channels than there are slots in the airwaves for them to be broadcast. Just like the phones in the UK will, in the not too distant future, move from POTS to a fully packet switched network, so too will television, especially once at least superfast (24Mbps and up) broadband is available to all - there are already rumblings that Sky would like to move to IPTV instead of having to bounce their signals off a satellite.
  • reaperducer 8y ago
    As is so often the case in life, it's a case of squeezing a balloon. In order to get more of one thing, you have to have less of another. In this case, to have more reliability in transmission, you have to have fewer choices. I can't speak to the UK's digital situation, but in the U.S. there are 50 channels available in a theoretical city. Assuming that digital has fewer co-channel issues than analog (most of my TV experience is analog), that means 25 signals. On those 25 signals, some broadcasters squeeze up to 10 channels, which all look like garbage. For a decent picture, it's closer to four — maybe five. So that means 100 to 125 theoretical OTA channels. If people could actually receive 125 OTA channels with good programming on them, or even the same content as is offered on cable/satellite, I believe many would drop pay TV in a heartbeat, and wouldn't be forced to also scrounge for content on Netflix and YouTube and Prime Video. If anyone has information on the theoretical maximum number of TV channels possible in a single location in the UK, I'd like to hear about it.
    • mikeash 8y ago
      I’d be shocked if 125 good channels would convince people to give up on-demand streaming services. 125 really is not a whole lot when you need to satisfy everybody, and the need to obey someone else’s schedule really sucks.
• outworlder 8y ago
  Indeed, that's a bit silly. WE are calling these things 'broadcast', while most implementations are really unicast. This works really great for things like netflix, where you can start watching whatever you want, independently. But in this case we really want actual broadcasts. Talk about square pegs and round holes...
  • harlanji 8y ago
    VOD = video on demand, unicast is good. Live = stream, multicast is good. The 1.5 second multicast estimate for next Olympics from BBC sounds reasonable based on my experience working with signalling and now live straming systems. Good read around the steps and impact around buffering introducing delay. My programmer brain said “sounds like the receiver should control flow into its encoder”... so is it that it’s too conservative a buffer, or the encoding algorighms actually need that much buffer to get economy?
    • isostatic 8y ago
      With PPP encoding you can get end to end h264 latency down to 7 or 8 frames while maintaining a cracking picture quality.
• mattmanser 8y ago
  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.
• laumars 8y ago
  I don't disagree with your point per se but you are over simplifying things. Here is my take after working in the industry: > It's instant It isn't. There are still latency delays with digital encoders, transmitter hops, etc even with OTA signals. It's just the equipment has gotten so good over the years that the latency has been pushed right down but it did used to be a lot worse. The same will happen with IP streaming given time. > scales infinitely It doesn't. You need geostationary satellites / multiple transmission towers, and all that only provides you a finite number of channels. In fact digital streams are actually much cheaper to scale up, which is why so many broadcasters are moving into this territory (and why I currently have a job) > kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking Superficially yes. But if you spend any amount of time around OTA broadcasters (as I have) you'll see there is a hell of a lot of complexity hidden from sight. In fact since OTA broadcasts are still digital streams served from content stored in digital formats, a lot of the technology used for internet streaming is the same for OTA broadcasts. So there is an argument for the simplicity of just serving that digital stream via IP rather than radio waves (or are you suggesting we go back to analogue as well? Because that also introduces a lot of complexity but of a different nature, like having to giant robotic cabs filled with hundreds of magnetic taps that all have to be wound to the right point; and a dependency on the postal service delivering those tapes since you now cannot just download assets from the content owners). I'm not saying there isn't a lot of new complexity with IP streaming but I do think it's more pronounced because: 1/ we work in IT so follow the technology more closely than we do for OTA broadcasting 2/ it's still a relatively young industry so there are a lot warts that haven't been cleaned up (much like how OTA broadcasting used to be a lot less polished when the technology there was still evolving).
  • adreamingsoul 8y ago
    Well said.
  • skellera 8y ago
    I believe they were referring to number of receivers of the broadcast for scale. Distance from the tower being the limitation.
    • 8y ago
• 21 8y ago
  > It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking. I'm not so sure. When I had analog over-the-air TV, in a non-capital city, I remember quite a few times when most of the channels would go down during a storm.
• thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking "Scales infinitely" is underspecified. Over-the-air broadcast scales well with the number of people who want to receive a particular broadcast. It scales very poorly on some other dimensions: - Over-the-air suffers from congestion when many parties want to send a broadcast simultaneously. There's only so much spectrum. In a wired network, you can just add more wires. - Over-the-air doesn't scale well at all when people want to receive the same broadcast from farther away. In a wired network, you can use longer wires, or relay data from one wire to another wire. (Relays will work for wireless too, but they make congestion that much worse.)