Advanced Television

ATIS standard boost for mobile multicast content delivery

April 28, 2014

Technology and solutions development organisation, the Alliance for Telecommunications Solutions (ATIS) ATIS has released a new standard, Multicast Delivery of Content to Mobile End User Devices (ATIS-0200011), which provides a key protocol by which content from multicast streams can be delivered to mobile end-user devices.

The standard extends previous ATIS work on multicast-based content delivery methods. It features three use cases describing potential situations where mobile devices can receive multicast-based broadcasts of specific live events/video content via the 3GPP Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast System (eMBMS). It also provides delivery processes, assumptions, content delivery network interconnection implications and supporting requirements.

“Multicast is a highly efficient delivery mechanism for advancing the cloud’s capability to enable many users to access the same content simultaneously — critical for streaming live events,” said ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller. “With users increasingly experiencing such events via their mobile devices, this ATIS standard helps reap significant savings in the network resources used for live streaming. With the wireless component typically the ‘last mile’ of the network, depending on the type of data requested, the use of multicast methods also offers significant relief for the wired backbone.”

The new specification builds on ATIS’s previously published CDN Interconnection Use Cases and Requirements for Multicast-Based Content Distribution (ATIS-0200004), which provides a description of multicast as a means for distributing content across two content distribution network (CDN) providers.

Categories: Articles, Mobile, Mobile TV, Regulation, Standards