In the wake of a rival’s World Cup streaming debacle in Australia, Telstra announced the rollout of its LTE-Broadcast technology that aims to enhance high-definition streaming to large groups.
Telstra’s first implementation will be in the AFL Live official app where weekend traffic for the Australian Football League has tripled in the last two years. LTE-B transmits the same data steam to multiple users in the same area rather than have individual feeds sent to each device. Such distribution frees up network capacity and permits higher quality video feeds.
Optus drew rebukes after struggling to provide reliable streams of World Cup matches in Australia that led to the company eventually relinquishing exclusive rights to the broadcasts.
Initially, the LTE-B will only be available on Samsung Galaxy S8 and S9 devices. Telstra has said the program will be expanded to additional devices and to additional sports. There are also possible public safety benefits of the technology, including emergency alerts and traffic updates.
“With the success of our AFL, NRL and Netball apps, we are now streaming live sports content to a massive base of around 1.2 million devices and sports fans consume 37 million minutes of live content over our apps on any given weekend,” Telstra’s group managing director of networks, Mike Wright, said in a statement. “This season we’ve seen an overall 58 per cent increase in customers streaming games. In some instances, more than twice the number of customers have streamed, compared to the same clash last year.
“As recent major sporting events around the world have shown, meeting the massive peaks in demand for live sporting content takes extensive end-to-end network design combined with careful network management and strategic investments.”
SportTechie Takeaway
Streaming continues to stake claim to ever higher shares of major sports broadcasts, with some pre-World Cup estimates pegging a nearly even split with linear television. More devices means more network congestion. LTE-B is a clever way to mitigate that problem, though its availability remains limited for now. In time, however, the tech will no doubt become industry standard—until something even better comes along.