Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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The internet wins for "consume when you want" but TV is always going to win for "live" whenever a large audience is involved. Just from a sheer efficiency standpoint, the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering.

That's why this model can work fine for niche live events that few people want but not so much for mass market live broadcasts. It's this reason that you've got to caveat "TV Shows" vs "Live TV" when you make that statement.

"Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't.

If anything, I'd see the major broadcast networks and ESPN continuing to get stronger, while everything else on TV gets weaker.

The only TV shows that people have to watch "live" are shows with a community built around them, ready to react and discuss it as it's happening (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc). This is where movie audiences are similar because that opening weekend crowd for an anticipated movie tends to share the experience.

I honestly wish they'd bring back midnight showings instead of 7pm Thursday showings, because that midnight crowd energy is impossible to replicate.

> the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering.

The technical solution for that is multicast.

The internet doesn't really support multicast, but there are workarounds; the best known is BAMTech, which grew out of live streaming MLB baseball and was purchased for $1B in 2016 by Disney.

I have no idea how they do it, but I imagine it's not that different from Netflix. Put a box in ISP's everywhere that acts like a multi-user PVR. One stream per channel going in to the box, thousands going out.

> "Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't.

Um, no? You could argue that it isn't technically caching, and the system doing it isn't technically a CDN, but there's no reason why a broadcast can't be streamed to, say, 1000 SDN nodes, which each spool the stream in memory and serve it to 1000+ different recievers. A SDN node (server) is different infrastructure than a television station, so there might be issues with capital outlay, but I highly doubt it's more expensive once sunk costs are tallied.

Latency for Cable TV is 3-4 seconds. That is possible to match, or at least be close to, with chunked delivery using CDNs. Most "live" internet is definitely delivered via CDNs, you just tend to be 20s behind real-time because it's delivered in 6s or so chunks.

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