Verizon Communications will stream the NFL Super Bowl 2014 to showcase its LTE broadcast video.
On Sunday, the most anticipated annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), or the Super Bowl will take place in MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, N.J., will be broadcasted live by Verizon's LTE Multicast technology.
Multicast LTE is a service that uses LTE network in distributing video feeds to several devices. According to the New York-based telecommunications company, its efficiency when it comes to distributing video feeds is way better than what the industry currently have, which is only limited to a single device per request.
The small scale testing will take place in a room inside Verizon's Power House in Bryant Park in Manhattan. It aims to give viewers a glimpse of the kind of service Verizon plans to offer later on.
Among the few chosen to give the Multicast LTE service a try is CNET's Roger Cheng. In his report, he said that since Verizon distributes a single video feed, the videos are of high picture quality. There is also no buffering upon loading of the video and minimal chances of delays.
However, the service still comes with a number of technical hurdles. One of these is its incompatibility with other devices. Even so, Verizon Wireless director for mobile video delivery Parissa Pandkhou is confident that the service will attract a lot of subscribers not just because of its good qualities, but for the amount of data it consumes, which is less than the traditional mobile streaming consumes.
As of press time, the company is in talks with possible media partners. Automobile companies, too, showed enthusiasm on incorporating a dongle into their merchandises, which can be used to pick up multicast signals.
Pandkhou expects to finish the work on the network upgrades that includes a mix of software and physical boxes before the end of this year's third quarter.
The official release date of the service is still uncertain.
