[jgalar]

I would guess cable video is multicasted once to many customers while online streaming has to be served one-to-one.

From the viewer's standpoint, the bandwidth usage is roughly the same, but the broadcaster and CDNs have a lot more data to deliver.

[ajanuary]

There is an awful lot of data that is routed around internally before you hit transmission. That's more what's being talked about here, not delivering the video to viewers.