AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — While mobile operators are still figuring out how best to deliver mobile TV via wireless networks or a mobile TV broadcast networks like DVB-H, they've already found another new wrinkle: the emergence of Sling Media.
When Slingbox users view TV programming on mobile handsets —IP video streamed from their living-room TV—the fear is that they will not only hog an already limited wireless bandwidth but might eventually bring down the network.
Att the IBC conference here, Blake Krikorian, Sling Media's cofounder and CEO, called the warning "stupid." With the mobile industry upgrading to 3G to increase network capacity and offer consumers high-speed service, an application like Slingbox on a mobile phone is "a high-class problem," and it's "a good problem to have," Krikorian claimed.
He argued that mobile operators should welcome more applications, such as his company's, to increase traffic.
Sling Media has designed certain smarts into its software — dynamically allocating bit rates, changing frame rates and optimizing resolutions in rendering video — to accommodate the network situation and end-user devices. Its target devices include PCs, MAC's, PDAs, personal media players and smart phones.
While Sling Media's goal is to give its users as much smooth video as possible, the actual number of bits consumed by each user for one hour, for example, is never constant. But in theory, if a Slingbox user streamed at 200 kilobits per second an hour-long TV program from his home to his mobile, he could consume as much as 90Megabytes per hour, Krikorian estimated.
While "bit torrents" could result if someone stayed connected to an IP network streaming TV for 24 hours a day, no one has actually done that yet, according to Krikorian.
Asked if an application like Slingbox threatened the mobile-TV business, Olivier Hascoat, director of multimedia services, at Orange Group, said, "We view it [Slingbox] as intriguing." He added, "Our job as a mobile operator is to focus on mobile propositions, not on home living-room programming."
But on the IBC show floor, some attendees posed the possibility that Internet Service Providers in the future may either have to revise the current "all you can eat" usage policy for subscribers, or find ways to track down and block usage by profligate Slingbox abusers. Otherwise, "the rest of the subscribers — whose bit usages may be only a fraction of that consumed by Slingbox users — would end up paying for the network," said one observer who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Sling Media's Krikorian begged to differ. "Ask cable operators like Comcast", which regularly upgrades its cable network system to the newest version of the DOCSIS spec. "They would tell you to bring it on."
Scare story about applications like Slingbox tend to be worst-case scenarios, said Krikorian, dreamed up by "a network manager whose job is watching the network, and who sees any traffic [in his network] as a threat."
