An online news portal, Bizjournals recently reported that AT&T is making preparations to unveil its LTE Broadcast service during the 2015 College Football National Championship Games scheduled on the Jan 12th. Bizjournal said that the second largest mobile operator in the United States is to hold a media preview during the event. AT&T announced August last year that it will launch the LTE broadcast service to mobile phones sometime this year.
LTE broadcast, also known as LTE Multicast, supports the delivery of the same content to multiple users simultaneously, thereby maintaining efficient use of spectrum and network investments. As video is expected to reach around 70% of all mobile traffic in 2018, LTE Broadcast is touted as the most efficient mechanism to distribute phenomenal amounts of digital content to as many viewers as possible.
LTE broadcast will be leveraging three key technologies including the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) - a 3GPP standard which enables mobile networks to offer broadcast/multicast services, HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding/H.265) - a new video compression standard which promises to halve the bandwidth required to transport video content and MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) - which simplifies and standardizes the adaptive delivery of video to consumer devices.
The same news reported that AT&T could apply the technology to cover more than just the delivery of infotainment video content as the technology can also be leveraged for sending apps updates. Bizjournal shared a use case scenario where auto-makers can deploy the LTE Broadcast for delivering software updates to their fleet of connected cars. This could also include updates to base-maps and other data stored on various applications on mobile devices. In addition, users can also enter LTE Broadcast areas while visiting a college campus, mall or convention, where they could get direct access to special content, streaming video or audio and breaking news with the same quality as if they were watching TV at home.
