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?
TL;DR
While it varies from station to station, it is common to receive or ingest the footage by receiving on satellite and recording it for later usage.
Where possible, the TV station will accept the media files from the production house or a distribution service directly. In this case, the media is usually in the MXF or MOV file formats.
The resolution is usually 1280x720 or 1920x1080, with a higher bit-rate ranging between 30 and 100 Mbps.
The only major difference between the consumer deliverable and the format the station has is the bit-rate. The TV station has equipment that can handle the larger files, and has a larger data storage capacity than most normal households. However, a well encoded Blu-ray will contain a close copy of the file the station receives, with an encoded bit-rate between 15 and 45 Mbps.
The main reason for the difference is bandwidth. One 24 minute episode at a bit rate of 145 Mbps stored in uncompressed MXF can be as large as 29 GB. Unfortunately, that has to be compressed in order to get it out to the millions of people that TV stations service.
There isn't an established format that all TV stations receive. It largely depends on the format that can be provided to the station, and what the station is setup to accept regarding equipment.
As Scotty Parker mentioned, a lot of the content is ingested into the studio via satellite. meaning, it's simply recorded as it's airing, like a fancy DVR and a dish that's bigger than average. When this is the case, the recorded format is usually as high as it can be, which is hopefully in most cases HD at 1280x720, or FHD at 1920x1080.
However, an increasingly large number of stations use content that is acquired directly from the production house. Meaning that the company who produced and/or edited the show will provide the media directly to the station airing it. In many cases this is a very high bit-rate, high resolution file. Something akin to Avid's DNxHD format (such as DNxHD145 or 175), or Apple ProRes, or Sony's XDCAM. But despite the higher-than-average bitrate of the file, the resolution is rarely anything higher than 1080p.
Unless you're the editor, and you'd be working with a 1080p file at a bit-rate of 145 or 175 Mbps.
But these formats are not secret, or kept from the general public. You can have the same formats TV stations use.
For example: File based workflows (where the production house turns over the raw media directly), the file would most likely be in the MOV or MXF formats. These files are normally encoded at a bit rate of somewhere between 30 and 50 Mbps (hopefully), and a have resolution between 720 and 1080.
Neither of these file types are hard to come by, and in fact, the MXF file type is listed as a SMPTE standard (SMPTE 377M). But how convenient would it be to sell you a show and make you download a 28GB file or a 32GB USB drive with a single episode of Game of Thrones?
So, it's made available to everybody in a compressed, but still very high quality format: Blu-ray.
These Blu-ray's are normally encoded at a 15-30 Mbit bit-rate, which although less than the raw MXF, is still very high.
Or you could download a slightly more compressed version from some website, or a streaming/OTT service (Apple TV, Netflix, etc).
Source: I work at a TV station.
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).
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 broadcast as well.
There are really two things that go on at a TV station, production and playout (With some crossover for things like live sports).
On the playout side a modern TV station looks very much like a datacentre and actually in some instances playout is even done from specialist bits of the usual cloud providers! Compressed audio and video (at a wide variety of bit rates) being carted around on IP networks, why not, you are going to be producing an MPEG transport stream at a few Mb/s or so at the statmux anyway.
Program distribution is generally file based, usually at a somewhat higher bit rate then the eventual transmission will be, but in most cases at a very much reduced rate compared to those used in production (Cost of bandwidth, particularly on satellite links).
For production, compressed video is NOT popular, because it will be processed extensively, 1.5Gb/s, 3Gb/s and 12Gb/s are the common rates over Serial Digital Video links.
IP based networks here are very much state of the art, at 10Gb/s(Often very slightly compressed (TECO) if running 4K), 25Gb/s, 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s links typically using leaf and spine networks using Cisco or Arista switching fabric, SMPTE 2022-6 is what most are using in the field at present, but SMPTE 2110 seems likely to take over once finally ratified.
Arena have the first 4K IP based production trucks 1, but it is clearly the way of the future.
For television the current format is ATSC (Advanced Television Standards Committee). The codec used is MPEG-2 (Motion Pictures Editing Group). It supports both 720p and 1080i. the i and p refer to the type scanning used in generating the image on the screen, i being interlaced scan and p being progressive scan. The audio portion of the signal supports 5.1 surround sound. ATSC supports both blu-ray and DVD for video with a wide range of aspect ratios and frame rates. However different systems are used in countries outside of North America. When transmitted both video and audio are combined using a process called multiplexing. In the receiver these signals are separated into their individual streams such as video,audio,subtitles, movie info etc by demultiplexing.
