Verizon Wireless: LTE Multicast Will Deliver Guaranteed Bitrate
Mobile video has been growing in popularity, thanks to 4G wireless networks, and the experience is going to keep improving. At a Streaming Media West panel on LTE and mobile video, Jack Arky, a principle member of the technical staff for product development at Verizon Wireless, spoke about LTE Multicast, which he's been working on for years now. LTE Multicast will vastly improve mobile video streaming.
"When you actually allocate this capacity to LTE Multicast, you assign what's called a guaranteed bitrate. So, once that barrier is set up and you're streaming video over it, that bitrate is guaranteed, you're going to deliver those bits to the end-users," Arky explained. "As a result, the quality is much better, it's uninterrupted, you're not going to experience the type of buffering you do over a unicast transaction."
The networks advantages of LTE Multicast show up as more streams are added.
"With multiple unicast access of the same stream, or other streams and other types of unicast traffic, you start to see that impact to your capacity. So that's a nice thing that happens -- that over multicast you're having everybody join this one stream and then not affecting the rest of your capacity," Arky said. "You can open it up for all the other good services that can happen and should happen over unicast."
Will that really mean no more buffering, the moderator asked?
"Only when you're tuning to multiple channels would you have a moment when you're negotiating that new channel. Otherwise, once you start streaming it's guaranteed," Arky said.
To hear more about LTE Multicast -- and why Verizon doesn't see it strictly as a video product -- watch the full discussion below.
LTE and the Mobile Video Business Opportunity
With the deployment of 4G LTE and the emergence of yet another enhancement to video compression in the form of HEVC, is mobile video now at a tipping point? In this session, operators and content owners discuss how they see the technical and business aspects of media over LTE unfolding and how the different implementation options and their respective business models evolve over time. Learn how wireless on demand content and broadcast delivery of linear content by conventional means can come together in a hybrid broadcast/streaming service.
Moderator: Vera Kenehan, Strategic Product Manager, LTE Broadcast, Ericsson
Speaker: Norman Tyrrell, Director Technical Marketing, Qualcomm Labs
Speaker: Jack Arky, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Product Development, Verizon Wireless
Speaker: Kerry Travilla, Senior Director of Technology, MobiTV
Speaker: Theodore May, SVP, Strategy and Business Affairs, Synacor
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