#bingeon

T-Mobile Adds Google Play Music And Others To Binge On Service #TMobile #BingeOn #GooglePlayMusic #TIDAL

T-Mobile continues to expand their Bing On Service with an announcement today that they have added 13 new providers.  If you aren’t familiar with Binge On, it is a part of most T-Mobile plans that allows you to stream content without counting against your data allowance each month.  There are now over 80 video providers alone in the program and music content continues to expand.  In today’s…

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Following a round of additions to its Binge On initiative in January, T-Mobile is tacking on more content to the data-free video option. Beginning today, YouTube, Google Play Movies, Red Bull TV, Discovery Go, Fox Business, Baeble Music, ESNE TV, Fil...

Original post: Engadget

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As an Internet developer, I’d like to think of myself as well-versed on the Net Neutrality debates and how important it is for the Internet providers to remain “neutral”.

As a consumer, I want a good deal on the things I use, and I want features that make sense to how I use the service.

So I’m intrigued why the Net Neutrality advocates are coming down on T-Mobile so hard for their new Binge On offering.  I think I’m actually going to switch to T-Mobile specifically for that feature.

My wife and I are parents, and we have been known to allow our child to use our phones to watch videos online.  This usually occurs outside the house.  

The mature video services like Netflix and Amazon Video strive to start playing the video as quickly as possible and avoid the “buffering” or pausing the video as more of it is downloaded to your device for playback.  They do this by figuring out how fast your Internet speed is, and then decreasing the quality of the video until they find the best quality possible on your connection without having to buffer.  Mobile Internet speeds are fast now that LTE and HSPA+ are commonplace.  So online videos over mobile Internet connections are consuming a lot of data simply because they can.

But that’s silly.  Nobody needs to watch Cat in the Hat in 1080p on a phone.

I looked for a way to help my wife and I spend less on mobile data use.  The path I went down as most-feasible was to create a VPN server at my house, then throttle any client connected to that VPN down to a slower Internet speed.  I abandoned the project.  It’s not simple, and I don’t have the time to mess with tc and traffic shaping tools.

But T-Mobile does this, and provides it for free.  And they even provide it without it counting against your data usage.  And I don’t have to manage a VPN server and tweak traffic shaping rules and provide tech support from a disgruntled wife when it doesn’t work.  And nobody has to remember to connect to a VPN server before handing the phone over to the kid.

Win. Win. Win.

I get the counter-argument.  T-Mobile’s Binge On only supports the services they support.  So it’s almost like they’re promoting those services by not charging you for data on those supported services, but charging you data for other services that aren’t supported.  I concede that Binge On isn’t a perfect solution in that regard.  But it’s a start.  And as long as T-Mobile is willing to talk with a smaller online video service like crunchyroll.com so that they can also participate with Binge On be on a level playing field as big guys like Netflix, I don’t see the Net Neutrality conflict.  

But a solution like Binge On I don’t think can offer a “throttle every video” solution, because a lot of video services aren’t sophisticated enough to downsample the video to support a slower Internet speed.  So buffering could occur.  And T-Mobile would get the blame for throttling and causing the buffering.  So I support putting the responsibility on the video provider, big or small, to integrate into T-Mobile’s Binge On program and meet their technical requirements.  Again, as long as anyone has the ability to participate with Binge On (and T-Mobile wants this), in my opinion Net Neutrality is maintained.

And you can turn Binge On off so you can stream something in 1080p when you choose.