Hearing your neighbors scream is never pleasant.
Who knows what they're up to.
But the most terrifying scream of all is during a football game on TV.
The neighbor suffers when he is watching the same game and the striker has not yet scored or missed him, but only a few seconds later.
The broadcaster is not responsible for these spoilers, but rather the type of transmission and the device on which the game is running.
Anyone who watches the World Cup games on their TV with apps like Waipu can follow the action in Qatar up to 29 seconds later than the screaming neighbor with the satellite receiver who is the least delayed.
The colleagues at the magazine "c't" stopped this latency.
Cable viewers and telecom customers with Magenta TV are about the same in terms of delay at six and five seconds.
DVB-T2, i.e. the terrestrial transmission of digital data, only has a delay of one to two seconds.
The length of the delay depends on what else happens to the signal once it's sent up into the sky to the satellite in Qatar.
Sending it from there to Germany's roofs and then to the receiver in the living room is lightning fast.
It takes a little longer before it is fed into the earth's cable network from high above.
And the streaming services like Waipu and Zattoo first take the signal, re-encode it and save the signals for a short time so that the images run even with a shaky internet connection.
Anyone who thinks they are as close to the ball with their bowl on the roof as the spectators in Qatar is wrong.
The fans always cheer six seconds earlier.
But you can't hear these screams - unfortunately, the neighbors can.