Comment on How come streaming or satelite don't have a playlist option? I got Dish and its annoying where I can't just tack on a bunch of movies or series and just let them play in an order I choose?

• bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  For broadcast television, especially over the air, there’s no additional load on the provider side for broadcasting to 1 or 1 million people. The TV consumers never have to communicate back to the broadcaster, and this is very efficient from a bandwidth perspective. It’s somewhat similar for cable in most provider situations, the video is broadcast over a wire rather than over the air.

  With streaming, each stream has to negotiate with a server to access the stream and the server serves the content to that consumer. This scales as there are more consumers, and the load on the provider increases. Caching layers and CDNs exist to distribute this load, and that is expensive. This is why streaming providers have a “Are you still watching” prompt if they think you’ve stopped watching, since it costs lots to serve the content.

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• EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Bamboo answered more thoroughly, but shorthand: streaming and broadcast are fundamentally different.

  A simple comparison would be an advertisement on a billboard vs advertisement via junk mail. Fixed cost vs per-person cost.

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