Asklemmy

44144 readers

1614 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

140

People under 25, how many of you are aware that you can get 1080p HD TV programming (and many live sports) for free over the air with no app sign-in or susbscription fee? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

107 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just curious because I don’t see people talk about it a lot.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Bandwidth is cheaper from the tower since the signal is the "same" for each client and it can then be distributed over a wide area. You send the "DRM" (Just a fancy encryption key) over the network since it's relatively small and likely unique to each device (probably fingerprinting the device ids to the content invisibily in case of piracy).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Multicast is a thing, though it doesn't seem to be widespread. That would make a lot more sense than this weird DRM broadcast system.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Multicast still requires more expensive less widespread bandwidth than sending out analog signals ota & shooting off a few packets of encryption information every now and then. US infrastructure has rapidly improved over the past few years, but we're still a farcry from anything robust and reliable enough to serve the people benefiting from this type of content.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Having the receiver phone home would have the benefit of generating more accurate viewership data, where broadcast tv has historically relied on representative cohorts.