ISSUE 03 2014
LTE BROADCAST
41
T
he road to mobile broadcast is littered with corpses. MediaFlo, DTH and numerous other technologies and standards have come and gone. But LTE Broadcast promises to be different.
Why? Mainly because the building blocks are already in place, so the additional cost involved should be more manageable than with previous attempts, and also because the audience has grown. The rise in smartphone and tablet adoption has meant that mobile data traffic is expected to grow 15-fold by the end of 2017, with over 6 billion smart devices in the market. This year alone, mobile video traffic is expected to increase by 75 per cent.
The main standards are already established. Driving the technology is eMBMS (evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service), which is a set of features defined in the 3GPP LTE standards that enables mobile networks to offer broadcast and multicast services. Then there is HEVC/H.265 (high efficiency video coding) that can halve the bandwidth required to carry video content, and MPEG DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP) that simplifies the delivery of video to devices.
End-to-end solutions are already available from LTE vendors. They claim that mobile network operators will be able to charge premium rates for premium content, with guaranteed quality, without the fear of network congestion or delivery failures. By using single frequency network technology, like Europe’s digital TV standard DVB-T, providers can distribute video to an unlimited number of recipients. So rather than multiple individual video streams, the network only has to cope with one outgoing stream.
The first trial of LTE Broadcast was back in early 2012, and since then there have been several more and one commercial launch.
In February this year, Vodafone Germany conducted the first live European trial of LTE Broadcast at a football match. Together with Ericsson, Qualcomm and Samsung, Vodafone allowed the crowd in the stadium to watch instant replays of goals or other incidents during the game. The users only required an LTE-enabled device with an LTE Broadcast app.
Qualcomm has also partnered with KT in South Korea, Verizon in the US and Telstra in Australia. In fact, KT became the world’s first operator to launch a commercial LTE Broadcast service in January this year, with its ‘Olleh LTE Play’ service delivering video to Samsung Galaxy Note 3 users.
In March, US satellite TV firm Dish was awarded new spectrum to offer wireless services across the entire country. It intends to use this unpaired spectrum to offer LTE Broadcast services.
It’s no coincidence that the LTE Broadcast trials have involved major sporting fixtures. Sport has the ‘here and now’ urgency, it commands large audiences and loyal fans, and broadcasters pay large sums to gain exclusive access
And Alcatel-Lucent was awarded an LTE contract with Etisalat that involves deploying LTE Broadcast in the UAE this year.
According to Qualcomm, we’ll be seeing eight mobile operator trials during 2014, with Verizon and Telstra moving to some form of limited commercial launch late in the year.
There is, of course, a ‘but’ coming up here. The TV industry is in a period of transition. Viewers no longer have to watch curated channels of content delivered in a linear fashion at a time that suits the broadcaster. Thanks to improvements in broadband networks, on demand and catch-up TV services have broken the established model, enabling viewers to ‘cut the cord’ and decide what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, and on what device.
Why, then, do we want to access linear TV on our smartphones – and be expected to pay for the privilege? Because we’re not all part of the Netflix generation, and not all content is available on these platforms – especially current shows. And, perhaps more importantly, we still need our old-fashioned linear TVs to be able to watch live events, such as sport.
It’s no coincidence that the LTE Broadcast trials have involved major sporting fixtures. Sport has the ‘here and now’ urgency, it commands large audiences and loyal fans, and broadcasters pay large sums to gain exclusive access – any way of offsetting some of that cost through new paid-for services would be welcomed.
However, Chris Nokes of BBC Research and Development has said that LTE Broadcast could bring “significant benefit in congested areas for live, linear TV,” especially in countries where there is re-farming of digital spectrum and problems with broadcast spectrum capacity.
There’s also an argument that LTE Broadcast is little more than yet another attempt by the established network operators to compete with the rising number of over the top (OTT) service
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