Whether it's being delivered to your living room via a dedicated cable or siphoned from the Internet in a glorious stream of 1s and 0s, the fact is that we're living in the golden age of television. You can access almost anything that your heart desires from a near 100-year-old library of entertainment. Not to mention the best new content, which arrives daily.
What is pay TV?
Pay TV, also known as cable TV, is the old dog in this fight. These services have been patrolling the block since the days when having the Internet at home made you the coolest kid on the street. They've got an established brand and a foothold in many homes across the country.
While international markets have dozens of providers battling for consumer dollars, the Australian market is more condensed. The biggest player for decades has been Foxtel.
Cable TV works as its name suggests. Content is delivered to your home via a dedicated cable, wired into your home by a professional and connected to a set-top box beneath your TV. The box acts to decode the programming so it can be viewed, and no Internet is required to get the viewing experience, although nowadays, some components of cable TV are reliant on the Internet.
Cable TV was born from an era when the Internet simply didn't have the capacity to handle video content at a decent resolution. The cable provides a dedicated pipeline between the broadcaster and your home TV. Because the content is arriving on your device, it's locally held at your home, which is why you can do things like watch live channels or record.
What is streaming video on demand (SVOD)?
Streaming video on demand, also known as SVOD or streaming TV, is the fresh-faced puppy. It's younger, more agile and active and it has a louder bark, but it can also be prone to error.
It has developed from a world where Internet connections are fast enough to handle high resolution video content. Therefore, there's no need for a cable connected to your home fitted by a technician. Instead, these services just use your regular Internet service, be it home or mobile broadband, Wi-Fi or ethernet.
Streaming works differently from pay TV. With streaming, you never have any more of the content in your home than what you are watching at any given second. The content resides "in the cloud", which is another way of saying that it's on the hard drive of the service provider. You then stream that content from their hard drive to your device, with the data downloading, displaying and then deleting as fast as you can watch it.
The idea of it being "on demand" refers to the fact that you're not held to watching whatever the live channel is showing. You can search for, then watch, whatever content you want from the service's available library.
The range of SVOD services available to Australians is currently exploding. While Netflix will always be known as the first major provider to find a foothold, a look at our detailed Internet TV comparison page will unearth more than a dozen quality services.
The biggest other names include BINGE, Disney+, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Stan, Foxtel Now 10 All Access and Kayo Sports. Each offers its own exclusive and original content, as well as vast libraries of fan favourites. BINGE and Kayo Sports have even burrowed deeper into the domain of pay TV by offering live channels as well as on-demand content.
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