[mattacular]

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?

[reaperducer]

maybe 10-15 years at the most

21 years ago, we learned to hate the word "Buffering..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks

[isostatic]

I remember an anecdote from an old school broadcast engineer I knew about 15 years ago. He recalled some sales guy from Real coming in and saying "with this new box we can broadcast to 5 thousand people". Engineer pointed to a picture of crystal palace transmitter that happened to be in the room -- "with that we can transmit to 5 million".

I'm not convinced how muliticast works to mobile devices, but it's a painfully edge case. This type of event occurs in the UK once every 4 years (the olympics doesn't pull in these numbers -- except for 2012 when it was hosted in London), and even then only when England do well (so once every 20 years)

That said, ITV latency seemed far shorter than BBC latency, watching ITV player seemed acceptable. Apart from the lackluster commentary and the adverts.

[vokep]

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]

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.