I would imagine that there is a delay involved in broadcast streams of, say, NPR and the like, as there is normally a seven-second delay for radio and TV, isn’t there?
How long is this delay with respect to both dial-up and broadband connections; or, am I wrong and no appreciable delay exists?
This delay is completely introduced by your computer. Any streaming media player will buffer enough data to ensure that it can continue playing in the event that some data goes missing and has to be re-requested, or there’s a temporary bottleneck, or… whatever.
Heck, your car CD player has a delay in it. Go over a bump, and it has enough audio stored to keep playing while it finds the cd track again and catches up.
I just listened to WRPI (www.wrpi.org) live and through their RealAudio stream in the same room. The RealAudio was about a second or so behind, I’d imagine this is strictly the buffering, as Nanoda says.
Joe,
The “seven second delay” you’re talking about is used during LIVE broadcasts only. It’s essentially a delay loop to let the censor folks who work for the station get a preview of what’s about to be sent out.
So if they hear or see something in the UNdelayed signal that ought not go out, they hit the mute or bleep or fade-to-black button immediately and that cut-out is applied to the DELAYED signal, effectively starting the bleep BEFORE the bad part starts. Sorta like time travel.
Seven seconds is just a nominal figure; the actual delay is whatever they’ve got it set to.
Note that since this is upstream of the public distribution of the signal, all broadcast methods, TV, radio, internet, subspace communicator, whatever, will all start out even in time with one another, but 7 seconds behind reality in the studio. So you can’t attribute any difference in your signal arrival times to that delay source.
This delay is not used if the broadcast is coming from a recording; there won’t be any surprises that’ll need to be bleeped, and so no censor staffer is on duty watching/listening intently, ready to push the red button. So no need of a delay.
As an aside, I often watch local sports over my satellite dish with the sound turned off, while listening to the commentary on the local AM radio. Why? The radio commentary is much more about the game vs. the witty soap-opera banter of the two egos yakking in the TV booth.
But the point for this discussion is that often the radio signal is about 2 or 3 seconds ahead of the TV. The radio says “He winds up, pitches, … and steerike two” and just then I see the pitcher release the ball towards the plate. This difference is presumably due to the time spent in the TV signal’s round trip to the satellite.