CAL6371;841909920 said:
ColoradoBear1 - Please excuse my ignorance, but what is IPTV? How does it work for the viewer/subscriber? Thanks in advance for your answer.
I may have used the IPTV term incorrectly, but Uverse is essentially a telephone service that carries TV... they actually don't broadcast all the stations over the telephone line, just the ones your household is watching. The 'cable box' tells some switching station off your property what you want to watch and it is delivered to your box only. It's essentially like every station is on demand, to use a cable term. In ways it's very similar to just streaming from netflix or any internet content provider, but AT&T controls the process and makes the money off it. But no matter how many channels Uverse offers, you are only getting the channels requested by your box. It's done pretty seamlessly so the end user can't really tell.
Cable and satellite broadcast all their stations in parallel, so every additional new station comes at a cost that something else cannot be broadcast in that bandwidth - in terms of the p12 network, if cable and satellite were to carry multiple regional nets, it would mean taking some other channel off line to fit it... just can't see that happening. No such tradeoff with uverse so in theory they could carry all 7 p12 nets (though may choose not to bother). Though there are other tradeoffs like I've heard households watching on multiple TV's can really slow down their internet, or vice versa. Others also claim that the picture quality of the HD is noticeably worse than cable or satellite on fast moving pictures like sports.
