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AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving'

cnet.com

1–6 of 6 posts

Re: AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving'

#2
I'm curious to know how they are planning on doing this from a technical standpoint. I can understand them throttling video streaming for their own services (such as the U-Verse app), but to do it for other services? I also can't imagine that the processing power required to do this on-the-fly is trivial.

Re: AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving'

#3

I'm curious to know how they are planning on doing this from a technical standpoint. I can understand them throttling video streaming for their own services (such as the U-Verse app), but to do it for other services? I also can't imagine that the processing power required to do this on-the-fly is trivial.

After reading a little more, it looks like they're capping any video streams they can detect on their network at 1.5Mbps, and not attempting to re-encode anything.

Re: AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving'

#4

I'm curious to know how they are planning on doing this from a technical standpoint. I can understand them throttling video streaming for their own services (such as the U-Verse app), but to do it for other services? I also can't imagine that the processing power required to do this on-the-fly is trivial.

They'll probably copy how T-Mobile does it.

Re: AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving'

#6
This was announced 72 hours after Trump was elected... a president who vocally opposes net neutrality.

http://about.att.com/story/att_introduces_stream_saver.html

Note that this is categorically worse than the T-Mobile deal. Unlike T-Mobile Binge On, this throttled data still counts against your data quota. Users get nothing in exchange. It's forcing a quality limit setting (one that most mobile video apps already provide) and making it difficult to disable.