Same with radio in cars. It just works.
* when the broadcaster screws up their RDS signal after a traffic report leaving you stranded on the wrong station.
* Or FM stations that run at different frequencies from different transmitters (this used to be a massive problem when driving long distances even just 20 years ago but now even the analogue car radios are digital devices that scan multiple frequencies to hop to the next frequency aired by a given station so you don't experience much cutout).
* Then there is the obvious issue of "dead zones" where the signals cannot reach (tunnels, some industrial locations, etc).
* Digital radio also suffers from frequent, albeit brief, cutouts while driving too but I've found that to have fewer dead zones than analogue.
* Bleeding used to be massive problem with analogue radio as well - this is another problem that was solved when radio started going digital.
So this is with 100 years of research and development into a protocol that requires an order of magnitude less bandwidth and yet most of the improvements have only been in the last 20 years when things like RDS (digital packets in analogue signals) and DAB have been introduced. Given that IP streaming video content isn't that far behind, just imagine how good it is going to be when that technology finally matures.
Wait, is this really a common thing? How would I know if a car radio does this, because I'm 99% sure my car doesn't.
And its a matter of complexity - its obvious why OTA would have less problems to solve in order to get the same performance and behavior of something more complex.
IP streaming does actually solve a lot of problems. Plus these days OTA transmissions are all digital anyway. So serving that digital content via the internet is a natural progression. Sure things are superficially more complex at the moment but the technology hasn't matured yet.
21 years ago, we learned to hate the word "Buffering..."
I'm not convinced how muliticast works to mobile devices, but it's a painfully edge case. This type of event occurs in the UK once every 4 years (the olympics doesn't pull in these numbers -- except for 2012 when it was hosted in London), and even then only when England do well (so once every 20 years)
That said, ITV latency seemed far shorter than BBC latency, watching ITV player seemed acceptable. Apart from the lackluster commentary and the adverts.