AT&T used the collegiate national championship football game in Dallas Monday night as a backdrop to the operator’s first live demonstration of LTE broadcast technology. Also known as LTE multicast, the company worked with partners Ericsson, Qualcomm, ESPN, Samsung and MobiTV to deliver two channels of streaming video and one channel of data to 40 LTE-broadcast enabled Samsung Galaxy Note 3 devices.
The demonstration took place in Australia, but it showed how U.S. television stations could potentially broadcast in the future. Ericsson, in partnership with Qualcomm, submitted its LTE Broadcast Solution to the Advance Television Systems Committee as a proposal for ATSC 3.0, the next-generation U.S. broadcast standard. “LTE Broadcast provides the ability to send the same content simultaneously to a very large number of devices in a target area,” says Thomas Norén, VP, head of Project Area Radio at Ericsson.
