Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo reiterated the company’s bullish stance on LTE multicast, a bandwidth-friendly way to deliver live TV to mobile devices, but said it’ll be another year before a consumer offering will be ready to go.
But the network was “ready” to deliver LTE multicast as of August, roughly eight months after Verizon demonstrated the technology in New York during the week leading up to the Super Bowl. LTE Multicast is a technique that delivers live TV signals wirelessly to mobile devices without gobbling up all of the cell site’s bandwidth. Instead of delivering unicast streams to each person viewing the video, Verizon’s multicast approach will rely on a dedicated portion of LTE spectrum to place the live event that can be seen by multiple devices that are connected to the cell site.
“[T]he chipsets are now being implemented into most of the devices that are coming out in the fourth quarter,” he said, predicting that it will be a year before handsets with the necessary silicon starts to reach the kind of volumes that will get the attention of content providers.
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