Why is it faster to watch television shows the 'normal way' through something like cable or satellite, compared to watching them over the internet?
This may sound like a funny question, but considering the actual medium may be the same (e.g. you can get the internet over a coax cable in the same way you get the TV) then wouldn't it be closer to the same speed and quality? I don't think my premise is wrong because you can watch 4K TV normally but unless you have a very good internet connection you would probably notice buffering when watching 4K online.
Is it because with the internet there's a lot more overhead (though I would have thought with protocols such as UDP less so)?
Best Answer
At its core your assumption "over a coax cable in the same way" is false. Cables simply carry an electrical signal. This signal can be encoded many different ways each of which is tailored to a particular usage including encoding schemes that combine multiple uses into a single signal.
"Cable" is fast at providing TV because it is a one way broadcast signal tailored to distributing TV channels to multiple subscribers simultaneously. Everybody gets the same signal at the same time with basically no variation. It is fundamentally one signal to many people.
Watching TV on the Internet is the opposite in almost every regard. It is a two way signal tailored to distributing data to individual subscribers on-demand. Nobody gets the same signal at the same time, and everybody has individual needs. It is fundamentally many signals to many people.
Modern "cable" has changed this by adopting newer bidirectional digital infrastructure influenced by data networks to allow for cable Internet. This further allows for new services like on-demand programming and set top box gaming. This required fundamental changes in the cable network and the electrical signals carried on the cables. Data networks have changed this by adopting multicast protocols to allow for large scale broadcast data to enable IPTV, on-demand programming, and set top box gaming. This also required fundamental changes in the data network.
The convergence will continue until "cable/IPTV" and "Internet" networks are indistinguishable. One day your Internet Service Provider will offer to hook you up with the 10,000 channel YouTube broadcast, and movie studios will broadcast IPTV multicast to the world directly. There still will not be anything to watch on broadcast and there will still be buffering on your personal programming because your favorite cat videos will never be popular enough to make it onto the broadcast schedule.