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Did they do that in order to make room for the Internet? I assume the channels switched instantaneously because they were broadcasting every single one to your
by jart 5y ago
Did they do that in order to make room for the Internet? I assume the channels switched instantaneously because they were broadcasting every single one to your home simultaneously. But maybe they wanted more room on the existing wires to store Internet traffic? So they changed the channel change button to ping a server to ask for the other channel to be broadcast. Could anyone confirm if my understanding is accurate? Either way, it definitely ruined the TV viewing experience. But for the Internet, it was worth it.
- zargon 5y agoWe're talking about over-the-air radio and tv. There are no wires. Or internet.
- roywiggins 5y agoDigital 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.
- jart 5y agoOh 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.
- aksss 5y agoDigital over the air was better quality than cable in my area for quite a while. I don’t use either now but I think cable was 720 and OTA was 1080.