Australian telco Telstra has claimed a world first with a video broadcast session over its commercial LTE network. But there will be much greater interest in Verizon’s planned broadcast of SuperBowl, the most popular US sporting event, on February 2 2014. That will be a far higher profile demonstration of LTE Broadcast and provide better evidence of how well it works for its ideal use case, an event where large numbers of people want to view the same content in a given cell at the same time.
Both Telstra and Verizon are using Ericsson’s LTE Broadcast Solution using Qualcomm chips running evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) that was first demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona. During Telstra’s live demonstration, various devices received concurrent video feeds, including a sports match replay, sporting network news, horse racing coverage and general news. The devices also received a large video file over the single LTE Broadcast channel.
This paves the ground nicely for the bigger Verizon test and then full commercial launch of LTE Broadcast in the US. But even now the eventual success of LTE Broadcast must be in doubt, despite having evaded the problems that caused earlier incarnations of multicast over cellular to fail. These included DVB-H (Handheld) and Qualcomm’s FLO TV service, which was closed in 2010 through lack of subscribers, devices and compelling content.
There is also the ongoing mobile TV initiative built on ATSC M/H, called Dyle run by US broadcasters, which appears to have stalled. But all these started too early and were doomed largely because they needed dedicated TV handsets to receive their various transmissions.
LTE Broadcast will enable access on standard handsets, since app processor chip makers, including Qualcomm have committed to support it in future SoCs for mobile devices. Many future handsets will be eMBMS compatible and therefore LTE Broadcast ready, whether operators want to deploy it or not.
Furthermore it is highly likely that Verizon’s Super Bowl pilot will be a great success. The problem is that events like the SuperBowl are relatively few and in normal operation LTE Broadcast will sufficiently significant efficiency gains for mobile most operators. This is simply because mobile cells are small compared say to DTT transmission areas and are getting smaller still all the time. During normal operation there will be rarely be more than one or two people watching a given video stream within a single cell at any one time.
In that situation LTE Broadcast becomes effectively unicast. However there will often be a number of people watching different video streams, so capacity will continue to be an issue. For that reason it looks more likely that mobile video will be better delivered through a combination of WiFi hot spots, which will have greater unicast capacity, and broadcast over an existing digital terrestrial standard via for example DVB-T2 Lite, which would also cater for the Super Bowl situation.
No doubt there will be some deployment of LTE Broadcast but it remains to be seen how well interest will be sustained when it turns out that it does much less than was hoped to relieve capacity pressure for mobile operators both within cells and over the backhaul network.