T-Mobile has announced that Binge On, its free video streaming feature, now supports YouTube, Google Play Movies, Discovery GO, Fox Business, Red Bull TV, and many other newly added video providers. The complete list of partners is available through T-Mobile's website.
Binge On is a free program that allows T-Mobile customers on a qualifying Simple Choice plan to stream unlimited 480p video from over 50 partners, including Netflix, HBO NOW, and Hulu since launch, without any of the data used counting towards their plan. The incentive has been criticized by some as a violation of net neutrality -- accusations that T-Mobile has repeatedly denied.
In December, YouTube accused T-Mobile of throttling all video, and not just the video of its Binge On partners. T-Mobile responded by saying that "mobile optimized" or "downgraded" are better phrases to describe how Binge On works, and stressed that all customers can disable the feature through their account settings. Earlier in the month, the FCC said it was looking into how the program works.
Yesterday, T-Mobile announced that it has renewed its partnership with Major League Baseball. Ahead of the upcoming season, the carrier said it will be gifting all T-Mobile customers with a free one-year subscription to MLB.TV Premium, a cross-platform service for streaming live baseball on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Android, PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Chromecast, Roku, smart TVs, and more.
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Net Neutrality states that you cannot throttle certain websites or internet traffic in order to reduce the quality of the service. It also states that you cannot charge a particular type of traffic or site extra to use your network. So if T-Mobile went to YouTube and said pay us $10,000 a month and we won't count your traffic towards our users data caps, that would violate net neutrality. Instead they have gone to Youtube and said we would like to give our users a CHOICE of viewing your content at full quality and have it count against their data caps or watch at a reduced quality and have it not count against their data caps.
Binge On doesn't actually throttle anything, instead it offers consumers the choice: Do you want to reduce video quality and in exchange we will not count it towards your data cap? Or do you want to watch in full quality, but it will count against your data cap?
The whole point of net neutrality is to put the choice into the end user's hands and not the network providers hands, T-Mobile is simply offering the end users and additional choice, which fits quite nicely in with the spirit of the law for net neutrality.
Incidentally, when watching on a phone, the video quality is just as good as watching full quality. I could see if you were streaming to your TV or something that it might not be, but for most it is perfectly acceptable. But again, it is your choice as to what you want to use.
[doublepost=1458240549][/doublepost]It is actually nowhere near violating net neutrality, if for no other reason than the consumer can choose if they take advantage of a special offer or not.
But you know that they aren't going to copy T-Mobile because what T-Mobile is doing is devastating their attempts at net inequality. T-Mobile isn't "paving the way" for AT&T/VZW/Comcast/TWI net inequality, they're screwing them over.
We went though this with "Music Freedom" -- the clarion call was that smaller providers / upstart providers / anyone that wants to attempt something new would be squeezed out -- Excluded from Music Freedom. Well, it's been nearly two years which providers, upstarts, or entrepreneurs have been shunned, excluded, or faced excessive technical hurdles, or even monetary hurdles caused by the demands to meet T-Mo's technical requirments to be included?