The two companies streamed the opening game of the 2014 World Volleyball Championship between Poland and Serbia to 300 guests at Warsaw’s National Stadium.
The guests were provided with LTE Broadcast-enabled mobile devices, with a preconfigured application for live streaming, and were privy to four hours of live, high-quality sporting footage.
“This successful test opens up the possibility of providing high-quality streams of sporting events and other programming to our subscribers, and we hope to offer this kind of service all over Poland in due course,” said Tobias Solorz, president of the management board at Polkomtel.
Ericsson’s LTE Broadcast solution enables the efficient utilisation of LTE spectrum to allow the simultaneous delivery of content to what is thought to be a virtually unlimited number of subscribers.
Video traffic is expected to grow by 60% annually until 2018, and LTE Broadcast is expected to help operators deal with the pressure to maintain network speed and quality, and retain subscribers.
“Ericsson has been at the forefront of developing and implementing this technology around the work, and it has great potential to grow much further with a wide range of use cases; for example to send updates and content to connected cars, digital signage or billing boards, as well as public safety and emergency broadcast services,” said Valter D’Avine, head of Ericsson’s region Western and Central Europe.
Polkomtel and Ericsson share a longstanding relationship and in August 2012 partnered for LTE infrastructure in northern and western Poland.
