What media format do TV stations use?

distro_dave

When a TV station commissions/buys/ rents a TV show, in what format does it get sent to them? I can't imagine it's film that they'd have to transfer themselves, but it should be clearly a better quality than you could buy the shows as home media (as a CD/DVDs or Blu-Rays), even decades later. What could be that format? Why has this media format never been made into public/consumer models?

Originally asked by Crow T Robot on Stack Exchange (movies) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

These days, most all network TV stations receive media via satellite and either rebroadcast the programs live or record them for later use. Most stations use hard drive based media servers to store programs and movies and have software systems to manage playback for broadcast. Some content is sent to stations on hot-swappable hard drives. Resolution is generally 1080p or 4k. Networks also sometimes send programming on discs (DVD or Blu-Ray). Wikipedia Info . Bottom line is, formats TV stations use aren't radically different from what consumers have access to. The media is just encoded at maximum quality. I do animation and industrial videos for a living, but often do commercials for TV...

Full answer by Chico the Friendly Monkey: https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/76643 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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