EE on Saturday conducted a live trial of its LTE Broadcast service with a small number of journalists and other participants at the FA Cup Final at Wembley stadium.
While the technology looks slick, the real measure of success will come with a commercial service, and that will require the mobile operator to broker deals with content owners, and to establish pricing models and use cases.
LTE Broadcast uses evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology to send the same content to a large number of users in the same location, without relying on traditional unicast streaming. For this demo, EE used three live streams from BBC Sport that were made available to users on operator-branded, Qualcomm-powered tablets. The eMBMS equipment was provided by Huawei.
A spokesperson for EE explained that building partnerships with content owners will be a key factor in the success of the service, although the group’s impending takeover by BT, which has ploughed considerable sums into sports rights in recent years should help with that.
The U.K. mobile operator also said it is working with a handful of operators in overseas markets – including Australia’s Telstra and Verizon in the U.S. – that are early LTE Broadcast developers and have shown interest in its application.
The EE app works very well and does exactly what it claims, in that it enables users in a certain area – in this case in a football stadium – to watch the game from various camera angles and to see repeats of key moments in the match within about 60-90 seconds of the action taking place. Thus, the use case should be simple.
But actually, for much of the time it was a distraction from the actual game, and after a few minutes I found myself putting it aside in order to concentrate on the live action. And I have to confess that I didn’t really look at the interactive Opta stats it includes.
I can see it working well for sporting events where there are more breaks in play, but for football, the best time to use the app m ight well be at half time and for the all-important post-match analysis.
Or, I could be wrong.
Perhaps in a few years keynote speakers at telecoms conferences, keen to demonstrate ongoing change in the industry, will show a pair of photographs in their slide decks – one of a football crowd simply enjoying the game, and another, taken a few years later, of a similar crowd in which the majority of people are holding up a tablet and switching their gaze between that and the pitch.
We will find out before too long. EE says it intends to build 4G Broadcast capability into its network in 2016.
