Q:

Is the delay on long distance interviews on TV real?

Often when anchors in the studio are talking to reporters or people from a long distance, there is a small delay in the response, maybe one or two seconds.
This got me thinking, why is there such a delay?
I've observed the delay seems mostly independent of distance, from as little as half a second to as much as five seconds. Also, the transmission delays don't add up: you could send a broadcast around the Earth in about 500ms by pinging e.g. Japan from where I am, over the internet, and a video link is far simpler (with fixed latencies mostly.)
Perhaps it is a deliberate delay created by the reporter, so they have time to think about the answer to a question; or perhaps it is added by the studio so that in case a man-in-the-street interview goes a bit bad they can cut it off?

A:

When broadcasting across a distance data needs to be compressed and it is buffered for this purpose. The buffer is a certain size, say 5 seconds at a time. When broadcasting live this buffering can cause overhead in the processing of the signal and can cause the signal to be delayed.

The codec needs a buffer because it
  analyzes video content over a period
  of time. For example, it analyzes
  movement or change from one video
  frame to the next in order to reduce
  the bit rate of the content as much as
  possible and produce high-quality
  images. To compress data at one point,
  it might use the analysis of data that
  occurs two seconds later. Therefore,
  the more data it can analyze, the
  better it can compress the stream.
  Reducing the buffer shortens the
  delay, but can result in lower quality
  images.

From Reducing Broadcast Delay.
In most cases this is unnoticeable due to modern technology. However when a reporter is on location they don't always have access to equipment to be able to stream without delay.
In some cases there is a deliberate delay included:

In radio and television, broadcast
  delay refers to the practice of
  intentionally delaying broadcast of
  live material. A short delay is often
  used to prevent profanity, bloopers,
  violence, or other undesirable
  material from making it to air,
  including more mundane problems such
  as technical malfunctions or coughing.
  In this instance, it is often referred
  to as a seven-second delay or
  profanity delay.

The best reference in the above article is this one.
These days the broadcasts can be seamless although when reporters are coming out of places like Libya etc. and they are using Skype or other internet video technology you will notice there is still a lag.

A:

Some transmissions are routed via satellite: so there's a bigger end-to-end delay, due to the longer distance, due to targeting satellites which are in distant, geosynchronous orbits (instead of going the shortest route).
To get to geosynchronous orbit and back is necessarily a round trip of 100,000 km, or about 0.3 seconds (due to the speed of light).
I experienced such a round-trip delay myself, when I phoned Australia from England in the 1980s: before transcontinental, undersea cables (which route signals over much shorter distances than sending them into orbit and back) became more common.
Also, general-purpose IP networks (i.e. simple packet switched versus circuit switched networks) adds extra delay to real-time signals: because they're 'bursty', it's not enough for the signal to have enough bandwidth 'on average' ... you want the signal to get through all the time, and so they'll be using a jitter buffer somewhere, which adds an extra delay.
That's not to say that there isn't also some extra seconds for editorial/censorship purposes. But the best case for a conversation that's routed entirely via geosynchronous satellite is a (noticeable) delay of more than half a second (4 legs: the outgoing question beams up and then down, and then the interviewee's reply also beams up and then down).

A:

Oftentimes the interviews are done over satellite uplinks.  Normally, with geosynchronous satellites, so there is a bit of a delay due to the fact that the speed of light is annoyingly slow.

