When YouTube videos tends to play for only 5 seconds and then 10 seconds of buffering. This was because that time the speed of the internet was not sufficient to play the whole video.
But when it comes to watching a show or event or movie on Television we never had faced buffering problems.
Have you ever thought why TVs don’t buffer?
This is very simple, when you are watching videos on YouTube, Netflix or any other platform every individual at any given time using the servers of any platform and choose their own specific video then, there may be a case of congestion, delays and buffering.
There are a lot of factors that affect internet bandwidth (speed). Some main factors are Bandwidth Allocation, Compression and Decompression Technologies and Distribution Method (Broadcast vs Unicast).
The main purpose of buffering is to deal with inconsistencies in the internet. If the connection between you and the internet server you were getting your content from was perfect then buffering would be unnecessary.
But the speed between you and the server is inconsistent, even for just a second, so the player will ask for several seconds of content before starting playback. That way if there is a temporary drop in internet quality it will be evened out during the buffer period. The buffer will most of the time be full but sometimes it will drop and you don't want your computer to pause playback.
Cable TV however doesn't have this problem, the cable company is sending every channel to your house in parallel all the time, even if you aren't watching. When you tune to the channel you just pick part of a signal which is already being sent to every house on the street. The quality of your connection is assured by the cable company and they have mechanisms to deal with any errors without re-transmitting any lost video.
We does not choose what to watch. Yes, we do choose the channels but what is streaming in that channel is not in our hand. These videos are being Broadcast i.e. only one signal for all the users.
Bandwidth: Cable TV has dedicated spectrum to each channel. Overall, the system uses a LOT of spectrum… a range over 600++ MHz (often 54 - 1000 MHz, older systems are usually clean up to 750 MHz). Cable plays games, they heavily compress some channels… to fit more digital channels on the same RF spectrum — quality suffers.
Compression and Decompression Technologies: The cable TV platform is engineered as a closed system: they control the compression/decompression (encoding and decoding) of the video signal, generally done in hardware on their provided set top box.
Distribution Method: “Tuning in” on cable is just changing the RF receiver to a new channel (spectrum). “Tuning in” via the Internet requires one to “request” the channel, exchange parameters, the remote end to begin transmission, and the Rx end to buffer and decode, and possibly adjust bit rate. Once live streaming is occurring, both technologies compete well… one could even get better data rates over the Internet (better quality is possible: with the bandwidth)… but changing channels is the slow part. Cable TV is always broadcasting the channels. Internet: you only request what you want, and your stream is unique to you. They scale differently, and there are various designs and methods to optimize both.
Most cable systems use a common high speed bus that is shared among a group of subscribers. When there are few users, the speed, or available bandwidth can be quite high. On the other hand, at peak usage hours, the bandwidth demands can slow the download speed to a crawl.
So, that’s why there is no case of buffering in TVs.