“Imagine having movies downloaded and ready to watch on your phone, without ever using your data or slowing down your device,” Claire Reilly reports for CNET. “In fact, imagine having movies on your phone without you ever having to think about downloading them.”
“That’s the promise of a new service announced at Mobile World Congress by Ericsson, Australian carrier Telstra and 21st Century Fox (through its in-house innovation group the Fox Innovation Lab),” Reilly reports. “The pilot program, which kicks off in Australia today, will push Full HD movies to a user’s phone without the need to download them, ready to watch with or without a network connection.”
“It’s all thanks to LTE Broadcast technology (also known as LTE-B or multicast), which lets carriers and telecommunications providers push content to a large number of users at once using existing LTE spectrum,” Reilly reports. “Best of all, the carrier only needs to use a single stream of data to push the content (hence the idea of broadcasting) rather than requiring each user to download their own stream and put massive strain on the network.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: There are also plans to trial the technology in the US, but no date or details have yet been scheduled. This technology is still very much in the testing stage.
That would be a nice way to stream live video… Many users could tune into a single broadcast… And maybe push sw updates too…
All these data limits have to go by the wayside before a true revolution in what’s possible on mobile devices can begin.
Reminds me of when the phone companies were raping customers with long distance fees that actually cost them precious little beyond a regular call. (I still have an inclination not to make long distance calls even when they essentially now cost nothing due to that conditioning.) And how many times does an infrastructure have to pay for itself?
“Best of all, the carrier only needs to use a single stream of data to push the content (hence the idea of broadcasting) rather than requiring each user to download their own stream and put massive strain on the network.”
This is a bit false. Broadcast & multicast saves on the source storage/server/network end, but your devices are all still separately receiving data, so the same load at the edge of the network.
And if it’s actually going to push the content to all (or at least all opted-in) devices at once, then it seems like it will significantly INCREASE the burden at the edge networks.
Boycott Fox.
Do any of you remember the uproar when Apple included the U2 album on everyone’s new phones? It sounds like this technology just makes it easier for the carrier to shove unwanted stuff onto my phone.