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back to article Shift over, TV firms: LTE Broadcast will nuke current mobile telly tech

Telephone companies could supplant television companies as the source of goggle-box fodder, says mobile gear-maker Ericsson as it promotes the new mobile LTE Broadcast specification. Unlike traditional mobile phone communication, which is one-to-one, LTE Broadcast sends the same data to many people. It's a little like the SMS- …

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  1. Tom 38

    There is certainly a need for it when massive traffic volumes are generated by large sporting events such as the World Cup. EE has reported that the goal scored by ex-Everton player Tim Cahill for Australia at 5.21pm on Wednesday 18th June resulted in the biggest ever single data spike across the EE network as people took to social media and streaming services to watch replays of the goal.

    So this technology would not help - these people were not watching a single stream broadcast to all users simultaneously, they were all individually served the content as they demanded it.

    So yes, super cool to be able to broadcast TV within a cell (although, if you're at the game, just watch the game?), but it will do sweet FA with managing the demand of people who are not at the game and want to watch snippets of it at a time that suits them.

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    1. Ol'Peculier
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      Thumb Up

      Think motorsport

      I went to the F1 in Malaysia this year, and the screen opposite the stand was next to useless.

      Imagine being able to see the world feed whilst the cars are out of view, or see the pit stops if you aren't opposite the start/finish line? Combine that with the radio broadcast already available and it's a different, erm, ball gaim.

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      1. Tom Chiverton 1
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        Re: Think motorsport

        That's what the Kangeroo system you used to be able to get for F1 did. But Bernie kicked them out and no one else has stepped in. Maybe there is no market after all ?

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        1. Ol'Peculier
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          Unhappy

          Re: Think motorsport

          Don't know, they still are used at NASCAR and I think golf. Was just FOM being greedy.

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      2. Tom 38
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        Re: Think motorsport

        Imagine being able to see the world feed whilst the cars are out of view, or see the pit stops if you aren't opposite the start/finish line?

        It still only solves one problem - "how do people at the event view more of the event". It does nothing to decrease the ever growing on demand traffic, which TFA suggests it will.

        The fact that it is cell specific should make improving the experience of people at events easier - they can provide special cells within the stadia that broadcast the content.

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  2. Disgruntled of TW
    FAIL

    TV on 3G - remember that promise?

    ... and with the checkered history of the mobile telco industry, there is only uphill ahead when selling space to the content producers.

    We were all supposed to be watching TV on our UMTS 3G mobiles, remember? That didn't happen.

    I have trouble getting a tweet out often enough, on my train journey into London. #fail

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    1. Warm Braw
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      Re: TV on 3G - remember that promise?

      Or DVB-H, or MediaFLO...

      There is no "currrent mobile telly tech", it's all been scrapped, as you say.

      Up to now, you couldn't realistically have expected anyone to spend more than a couple of minutes glancing at some crumby low-bandwidth content on a tiny screen. It *might* be different when/if people sit down and watch TV on their tablets for long enough to catch some adverts. But I doubt that any of the people who bet on the unrealistic earlier attempts will be keen to repeat the experiment soon.

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  3. tentimes

    Sorry but this is nonsense

    The most you could hope for is a very limited set of data. What happens to net neutrality if everyone starts multicasting 500 channels? It's so, so wasteful compared to DB. If we keep heading this direction it saturates the wrong type of area with the wrong type of data.

    We need to keep broadcast and unicast totally separate.

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    1. Degenerate Scumbag
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      Sorry, but you're talking nonsense.

      You appear to have no understanding of the topic at hand.

      Firstly, it has no direct bearing on net neutrality. Net neutrality is about how network participants treat each other's traffic. A new technology such as this might be used as an excuse to break net neutrality, but the problem would lie with the ISPs, not the technology.

      Secondly, you don't seem to understand the technology at all, and use the words multicast and broadcast interchangeably, while talking about it being "wasteful", which is totally wrong. It makes me suspect that you're talking about IP multicast over LTE. LTE broadcast is a genuine radio broadcast technology implemented on the LTE system.

      DVB broadcast = one radio transmission on one frequency listened to by many receivers = efficient.

      Conventional IPTV (including IP multicast) over LTE = Individual 2-way LTE frequency channels to each receiver = very inefficient.

      LTE broadcast = Single 1-way LTE broadcast frequency channel listened to by all receivers on the cell = as efficient as DVB.

      In fact, more efficient, because LTE is much much much better at cramming data into the available frequency spectrum, and cells are more localised and run at much lower transmission power than TV transmitters, so block frequencies from reuse at a much smaller radius. Why are there so few terrestrial HD DVB channels? because they don't have enough spectrum. DVB is a dead-end.

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      1. Paw Bokenfohr
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        Re: Sorry, but you're talking nonsense.

        Indeed, you only need for one person in a cell to be watching the stream for it to be efficient. For the proposed scenarios, this will free up a metric shit tonne (that's a real thing of course) of bandwidth because rather than having 10 or 50 or 1000 LTE streams in the cell doing broadly the same thing, you have just one, and all the rest of that bandwidth is spare AND you have less stress on the backhaul (as often the problem as cell capacity) so it's all awesomeness all the way.

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  4. P. Lee

    I have a query

    How difficult would it be to include a tv receiver in a phone?

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    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
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      Re: I have a query

      Trivially easy, but there would be no income stream for the phone companies...

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I have a query

        Quote

        Trivially easy, but there would be no income stream for the phone companies...

        Perfect. Brilliant, Where can we sign up?

        Since my local cell went to 4G I've have several crossed lines, inability to make calls (even to the carrier) and data transmission worse than the old 3G. Progress eh?

        Luckily if I go to the back of the house 4G suddenly disappears and 3G works perfectly.

        I wish that the carriers would sort out their existing services before adding all this bloat on top.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I have a query

          Since my local cell went to 4G I've have several crossed lines, inability to make calls (even to the carrier)

          Curious, since 4G is only for the data part, voice calls still use the 3G network.

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  5. Mage Silver badge

    But ...

    It will be Pay TV only.

    Not FTA.

    3G has no Broadcast mode so inherently can't do it, nor can regular LTE. What they are offering is an extra on air interface broadcast mode integrated with LTE. It's really just "DTT" in an LTE Infrastructure.

    This is very much more expensive than DTT. It would be far cheaper to have NOT sold 800MHz band and allowed more low power DTT "fill in" to give mobile DTT coverage. But the Mobile operators nor Government can't make money out of that. Only Arqiva. So no "Digital Dividend" (= Mobile Licence Fee to Regulator and nothing more).

    Unfortunately with combination of Ofcom's "light touch Big Business friendly we don't care about consumer" regulation and Mobile Operators ambition to get part of Pay TV pie it will happen.

    So you will have to pay £300 a year for poorer quality version of what is free today, just so portable coverage is better and to make Mobile operators money. Logically extending DTT with "fill in" does this far better. A DTT chip can easily be in a phone. Some manufacturers do have it for years. They tried this with DVB-h, but that needed TV band spectrum. DVB-H would have been Pay TV.

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    1. Mike Pellatt
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      Re: But ...

      I would have shared your pessimism.

      But I suspect commercial, as well as technical, reality will endure this just doesn't happen.

      After all, DAB has been such a success, hasn't it ?? And all new cars come with DAB radios that perform just fine, don't they, just like we were promised ??

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  6. Tom Wood

    Advertising companies

    mobile phone companies could buy vast numbers of large scale video screens and then sell advertising space on them. ...

    Mobile operators who feel that they have lost what they regard as core revenue, from apps to new entrants, may well feel motivated to try the field of media sales but will find winning the hearts and minds of advertisers very much harder than they expect.

    Why would this technology require the phone companies to buy the video screens?

    There are already video screens that show advertising. They're operated by advertising companies who also run more traditional billboards too (JCDecaux, Clear Channel, Exterion etc). Presumably they get the content to them somehow already. Maybe LTE Broadcast will provide a better way of getting content to the billboards but why would the mobile phone companies want to start buying billboards themselves? Wouldn't they just offer LTE Broadcast as a service to the existing billboard companies (assuming they want it...?)

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  7. Steen Larsen

    Mobile TV available in France - a long time ago

    Here in France most operators already offer TV on your phone. They have done this for a long time and it works fine on both 3G & 4G. I do not know if it uses any kind of broadcast technology. When we watched France Switzerland the other night a warning about the data usage was shown.

    The quality was great on a Galaxy S5 but we soon realised that we were watching a delayed stream (about 1 minute) when the rest of the square broke out in wild cheers at the first goal.

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  8. Bluenose

    Who cares?

    At the end of the day countries will still need DTT for the simple fact that millions of people cannot get a 4G signal and the 3G they get is pretty crap too and that is just in the UK.

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  9. dan1980

    Technology is one one thing; bitching, lobbying and gouging by content providers is another.

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