Verizon has announced the formation of the LTE-Broadcast (LTE-B) Alliance alongside EE in the UK, South Korean operator KT, and Telstra in Australia. The international carriers, spanning four different continents and boasting over 200 million mobile subscribers, aim to make LTE-B available in all top- and mid-tier devices launched in 2017. LTE-B technology, or evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS), supports multicast (one video stream sent to multiple receivers), which benefits operators by freeing up precious bandwidth compared to one-to-one unicast. Unicast transmission will never be economic for popular linear broadcast services, so the real battle will be between mobile operators and broadcasters for control of spectrum for multicast video. The four alliance members have all successfully tested LTE-B; KT…