re: Won't have cable Saturday. Need antenna for the game/CBS. Recs?

quote:

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Just remembered there are people close to us with with direct tv satellite deal and they were ahead of us on everything last year.

Would an antenna cancel out the delay?

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I would think so. Antenna should be about as close to "live" as you can get. I don't know all the specifics about the "hops" a live game feed takes, but I would imagine the video makes its way from the game, through the control room (which may be on-site?), and up to the satellite pretty quickly (though there is usually an intentional "seven second delay" for censorship purposes). Your local affiliate should get the rebroadcast feed from the satellite almost immediately, and they probably put it back out over the air almost immediately (after inserting local ads, I suppose). There may be another hop in there where the feed goes through the station's main control room or something, I don't really know.

As for DirecTV, they have to wait until all of the local affiliates process the feed before they get it. So then I guess those feeds have to go back up to space so that DirecTV can then send it back down to their subscribers.

Cable companies probably get the feeds about the same time as DirecTV, but I would imagine they can retransmit it faster than DirecTV because they don't have the delays associated with the extra satellite hop.

Streaming services almost always lag much further behind, because they have to do a lot more processing. They have to transcode the feed to multiple different bitrates (for fast vs. slow internet connections). They probably distribute the video to multiple datacenters around the country/world to spread the load, and then it can finally make its way to subscribers. Then the stream has to buffer before it'll actually start playing.


So, as a crude visualization, I think the delays might look something like this:

LIVE--->Antenna---->Cable-->DirecTV----------->Streaming