T-Mobile Is Becoming a Cable Company (engadget.com)

T-Mobile has revealed that it's launching a TV service in 2018, and that is has acquired Layer3 TV (a company that integrates TV, streaming and social networking) to make this happen. The company thinks people are ditching cable due to the providers, not TV itself. Engadget reports: It claims that it can "uncarrier" TV the way it did with wireless service, and has already targeted a few areas it thinks it can fix: it doesn't like the years-long contracts, bloated bundles, outdated tech and poor customer service that are staples of TV service in the U.S. T-Mobile hasn't gone into detail about the functionality of the service yet. How will it be delivered? How much will it cost? Where will it be available? And will this affect the company's free Netflix offer? This is more a declaration of intent than a concrete roadmap, so it's far from certain that the company will live up to its promises. Ultimately, the move represents a big bet on T-Mobile's part: that people like TV and are cutting the cord based on a disdain for the companies, not the service. There's a degree of truth to that when many Americans are all too familiar with paying ever-increasing rates to get hundreds of channels they don't watch. However, there's no guarantee that it'll work in an era when many people (particularly younger people) are more likely to use Netflix, YouTube or a streaming TV service like Sling TV.

Comments

Bad headline

[bananaquackmoo]

They're not becoming a CABLE company, they're becoming a company which provides video. HUGE difference.

Re: Bad headline

[Obfuscant]

Sling isn't a "cable company". Hulu isn't a "cable company". T-Mobile is not becoming a cable company. Cable companies deliver video using a specific medium. Can you guess what that might be? No, maybe not, because I think you fail to understand what differentiates a cable company from a wireless company.

Here's a hint. T-Mobile is one of those ISPs who aren't limited by the municipal franchise requirements for access to the poles and conduits. That's because they don't use __________

I can see this working

[AvitarX]

They dedicate 40mbps*50 channels for 2gbps, that's what, 2-10% of a tower (I'm seeing LTE towers are built for 20-100gbps), assuming they can make devices that pick up broadcastlike.

So for a 2-10% reduction in mobile data speed for customers, they can offer 50 high quality (4k HDR) channels using H.265 (I assume, I don't actually know how efficient it is, I'm basically taking blue ray * 4 (pixels) / 2 (efficiency)).

If they can sell/rent a receiver for a reasonable price that can take their broadcast they can have super high quality live TV for minimal bandwidth reduction for their regular market. They can then lean on people having home Internet or much reduced resolution for on demand content (maybe 5 mbps as Netflix recommends for HD), this is in the realm of what I typically get at a minimum when checking my LTE speed (5-50 in my home city). They could maybe limit on demand content to SD speeds (1.5mbps), but allow you to subscribe to shows and have access the day after aired at 4k, downloading in off times (including allowing the downloading of Netflix downloadable shows).

This seems like a very doable and smart thing in an era of people hating cable.

Re: I can see this working

[AvitarX]

Yeah, but I've read that they're 4k isn't much better than upscaled bluray, and I don't think it's HDR (which is only a 25% increase at worst I think (8->10 bits, probably easier to compress though).

My point was they could offer a significant number of channels better than any video most of us have ever seen (I've personally never seen a 4k HDR video that I'm aware of, maybe most people have and I'm wrong).

Bluray quality, but 4k and HDR would be a pretty killer feature I think, and based on my experience with cable (not giving me HD without spedning significantly more) would be something they have that nobody else does. If they're broadcasting it (rather than streaming it personally), it's probably worth using 10% of a tower's capacity to be the best.

Basically, they could offer 50 channels at better than anything else on offer, better than anything I've seen, and able to max out what can be seen on many TV sets (which are mostly not getting more than Netflix 4k, or bluray 1080p right now). They could be the company that brings 4k HDR to TVs, and use that as their killer feature.

Realistically, they'd probably have 3 classes of channel, high bitrate (I proposed 40mbps), standard 4k (Netflix's 15mbps), and HD (Netflix's 5mbps), this would allow them to have 100+ channels, plus some error correction for the inevitable dropped packets, while still only using 2-10% of a tower's capacity.

Re: I can see this working

[AvitarX]

Why doesn't it scale? Is their any fundamental reason they couldn't use an LTE like technology to broadcast using similar (RF) bandwidth as LTE (I'm using broadcast to mean 1 sender many receivers)?

The broadcast part is pretty much scaled by definition.

for mealtime streaming they'd likely use 5mbps (Netflix HD), that gives a tower 200 homes at a 10-50% reduction in overall network bandwidth (20-100gbps tower), there are probably places that would work too (sparser suburbs, not universally).

There's potential to use caching too, to prevent popular content from hitting the back haul, the LTE network itself is apparently capable of up to 18(subdivided)*128(users)*600mbps (this seems really high, just reading this), if the top 10% of content is 75% of streaming (made up numbers but seem reasonable), that's essentially allows for a lot of streaming that doesn't hit the back haul (perhaps only the popular content can be streamed HD in real time).

if 75% of streams (and all live) are cached, then 20gbps back haul can handle all live (100 channels in HD for 2gbps, with a mix of 5-40mbps), + plus 75% of
  cached streaming for some small part of back haul, but a significant part of the Wireless network itself, plus another whole lot of 5 mpbs streams to the end user.

It seems very scalable to me even without being able to broadcast the signal (just caching the live TV, plus the last 1000 hours of streamed content (40mbps * 60 seconds * 60 Minutes / 8 (bits in a byte) gets me 20 TiB of storage for 1100 hours).
as
That can be the most popular 1000+ episodes of the week, which must be a huge percentage of the non on demand part, if a cell tower really is capable of 1.3tbps, that's 34k steams at 40mbps, assuming 1 in 3 people are streaming at a time, that leaves plenty of space for overhead and the 100mbps of capable of hitting the internet traffic do to back haul.

It seems very scalable to me.

I'm actually going to say that I think they could probably get away with streaming their own service at 40mbps, with only very rarely needing to drop uncached streams to 5mbps.

There are 6 Tmobile towers in my county of 200 thousand households, so it won't work to provide 40mbps for everything even with the newest tech everywhere, but I could see them being able to handle a significant number of households with those six towers (if we say each household is using 3 streams on average at peak (your number) and they allow one 1 ultimate quality and 2 HD per a house for 50 total mbps (I think that sounds really hi), that's 400 mbps at peak, each tower would need to be able to provide 1/3 theoretical maximum to cover 25% of the houses, if it's profitable they can build out more.

Re: Cable is dead

[rudy_wayne]

Guess what? Old school and believers in the original ideals of the internet will consider that damage and route around it. Or find alternate ways of streaming it.

Apparently you have no understanding of how things work.

A very large percentage of people (in the U.S.) only have one choice for a broadband Internet connection and its one of the companies who have spent a lot of time and money lobbying against net neutrality.

Re:Throttle DOWN

[SlaveToTheGrind]

This has got to be intentional as these companies are salivating at the thought of making our internet like cell phones before 2007 where you had to pay a monthly fee for each service such as adding a ringtone or a map program. Net Neutrality now is the only force holding them back.

Yeah, because that's exactly what we all had to do between 2007 and 2015. I'd suggest decaf.

Cable companies have worst customer service rating

[raymorris]

>what companies like Cox, Charter, and Comcast do.

This is what Cox, Charter, and Comcast.do:
--
  already targeted a few areas it thinks it can fix: it doesn't like the years-long contracts, bloated bundles, outdated tech and poor customer service that are staples of TV service in the U.S.
--
Of the eight companies with worst customer service ratings in America, two are major cable companies.

Their *goal* is to provide cable-like TV without becoming a "cable company" like Comcast and Time Warner, companies consumers loathe.

Their "uncarrier" initiative with mobile phones included things like getting rid of the half-dozen extra fees that typical carriers add to your monthly bill. Ever noticed "terms subject to change without notice"? T-Mobile is doing away with that. They are trying to be a different kind of company providing these services. I hope they succeed.