AT&T and Video Share

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

I totally missed this one!

I’ve been to NXTcomm. I sniffed around. I searched for IMS. I came back empty handed.

But then – AT&T actually announced their Video Sharing service during the show. And on the same day I was there…

I first found out about it in MobileCrunch blog – good I’m reading others. Two days after it was posted there, my Google alerts went jiggling happily about this service. It’s so good to know that operators are going to offer Video Sharing as their first IMS service.

To those of you who don’t know what Video Sharing is and those who would like to understand what can be done with this technology, AT&T were kind enough to have some mockup demos in their site – they’re quite good.

The interesting this is that they will be doing that over their WCDMA network and not CDMA2000 EV-DO one. The reason for that is the way these two technologies differ from one another.

In WCDMA, you can utilize both the circuit switched and the packet switched networks at the same time. This means that you can do an audio call over the circuit switched connection (as it is done for every audio call today), and then you add the video over the packet switched network (the data capability of the network).

But in EV-DO, this is impossible. You either do voice calls over circuit switching or data of some kind which would be packet based. So to do Video Sharing over EV-DO would require doing the voice over IP as well – and that’s a whole different ballgame.

So Video Sharing it is.

Let’s see which operators jump on this one next.

Additional coverage - Wired News, AT&T Site

Technorati Tags: NXTcomm, Video Sharing, IMS, Tsahi Levent-Levi