Coming by way of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference, Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam has said that streaming video now accounts for 50 percent of the network traffic. And extending that out a few years, McAdam believes that streaming video will account for nearly two-thirds by the year 2017.
Time will tell how accurate that prediction will be, but for now McAdam seems happy about the company’s investment in LTE. McAdam spoke about how with 3G you have buffering and went on to say that “with 4G you can stream video.” The event also had McAdam talking about their plans for LTE Broadcast technology. This is something that was touched upon back in January during CES.
Part of that talk included how Verizon plans to use LTE Broadcast technology to make live events such as the Super Bowl available for Verizon customers to stream on mobile devices. Interestingly, McAdam acknowledged that majority of customers would still prefer to watch the Super Bowl in their living room on a regular television and made it clear they “don’t want to get in the way of broadcasters.” As to the reasoning why they would want to stream the Super Bowl, McAdam believes Verizon could “add a dimension” and have it become “better.”
We will have to see if they will end up streaming the Super Bowl come 2014, however with plans like that — it starts to become easier to understand why Verizon believes streaming video will account for two-thirds of network traffic by 2017. Assuming they begin streaming large events like that, the two-thirds milestone may end up coming quite a bit sooner than 2017. So how about it, anyone watching lots of streaming video on a tablet or smartphone?
[via Fierce Wireless]
