lchiu7: If you had read the article about all the technical challenges the BBC had in streaming the World Cup in 4K then you would have seen that despite having a fast fibre connection to your home, that is only the tail end of the distribution. The BBC had to limit the streams to 60K users they said.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/5c5b8f80-891d-4b51-babd-8814c1511b4e

 

"We decided we’d be comfortable with a maximum number of around 60,000 concurrent UHD viewers, but that the number would be continually re-assessed during the tournament depending on overall performance. We also estimated there were maybe 2 million devices that might be capable of playing the UHD streams, hence the warnings about the streams being available on a first come, first served basis."

 

If you can receive the OTA signal, then that's got to be a more reliable delivery mechanism and not relying on such much infrastructure.

 

Conversely, Sky/Vodafone's TV over fibre offering shows that it's possible to distribute to many customers via multicast. You don't get on-demand features this way, but for live broadcasts it removes most of the strain from the network.